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Ask HN: Why is Netflix becoming anti-social?

6 points by foomarks ↗ HN
I feel like Netflix is not giving us a straight answer on why they completely removed the Friends features from their service. It was half the reason I even use their service. One commenter left one good theory, but I'm curious if there are other good theories:

"Here's why I think NF is killing the friends features. The company is buying fewer DVDs because it's moving towards total streaming. The 'recommendations' the site pushes are only those that are 'available now' or on Instant Watch so the company doesn't have to buy more inventory. If customers no longer have the friend features it makes it harder to find 'unique, classic, independent, etc movies N-F doesn't want to buy anyway."

http://blog.netflix.com/2010/03/friends-update.html#Blog1_cmt-4755499758062243309

11 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] thread
thesethings
Maybe if folks like Netflix are so bad at the social part, we should separate the place where we talk about movies, from the place where we consume them.

Kind of like how Good Reads + Library Thing are better than Amazon for discovery/listing/reviewing books (I partially take that back, Amazon is pretty good at discovery of "similar.")

Anyway, what this incident makes me think about is: We just need a good social site where the social object is movies.

Is there already a GoodReads.com of movies?

mos1
To quote NetFlix: "Friends is a feature on the Netflix Web site that’s been used by less than two percent of all subscribers since we added the feature in 2004."

That strikes me as a wholly adequate explanation.

thesethings
If you read the (unfortunately unthreaded and super-hard to browse) comment thread, there were a lot of users questioning that.

I guess I'd like to know more about "active" users, and social features.

Also... in 2010 it's just super surreal in a domain as vast as "movies," to not have deep social features to help people manage and discover.

I'm buying the OP's suggestion that Friends was turning up tons of recommendations that you can't stream (that part is the studios' fault, not Netflix's), and it was leading to a lot of dead-end experiences.

But I just really don't buy that Netflix's longterm strategy is to get less social. They are too ahead of the curve, and too smart to think/do that.

My personal theory is that they are overhauling Friends and social in general, behind the scenes.

drivingmenuts
But how many people were questioning as a percentage of their entire userbase?
waterlesscloud
They never really found the way to make Friends work. It was always cumbersome.

I suspect what's really happened here is that whatever internal group was responsible for Friends as decided to hide their failure to make it work behind a screen of "no one wants it".

foomarks
I loved their .02 feature which was essentially like short little tweets you could send to other friends. It was super easy to use and before my friends ever understand how to use Twitter, they knew exactly how to use this feature.
waterlesscloud
Inventory costs aren't the factor here. The cost of making films available isn't going to change a lot with streaming. The physical cost of a DVD is very low, it's the content that costs, and streaming vs physical isn't going to dent that.

Now, Netflix's delivery costs are something else. Obviously that's a much bigger factor in the dvd vs streaming debate.

puredemo
Why would you want Netflix to be social? Fuck, let me watch a movie in peace.
brk
I kind of agree, and as a long-term Netflix user, I never really used the "Friends" feature on Netflix. I may have a really strong friendship with someone, but that doesn't mean we have similar tastes in movies.

I am good friends with someone, we'll talk about movies in meatspace, or maybe on Facebook.

The Netflix "Friends" thing seems to be caught in a bit of a void. Your stronger friendships for casual movies discussions are likely to be maintained on Facebook or Twitter. While the hyper movie aficionados seem to be on imdb or other highly specialized movie discussion boards.

I like the recommendations engine on Netflix, the streaming, the ease of finding movies to watch, but I don't see it as a social hub.

puredemo
I think the one thing I might use a friends feature for on Netflix is friending people I didn't already know who had extremely similar taste in films to me, solely for the purpose of seeing what they think about new releases. That would somewhat interesting.