Netflix has withdrawn one of the features that had existed on the platform since 2021. Reportedly, no one was using it.
Sometimes platforms know better what their users need, or at least they think they do. The result is the shutdown of one feature that had been on Netflix for more than two years. Reportedly, few people used it, but according to users, the problem lay somewhere else.
People didn’t necessarily know that such a thing existed at all and simply didn’t reach this section, or possibly didn’t pay attention to it. This is because it is all about “Surprise me.”
A feature that is disappearing from Netflix
In theory, the idea was a very good one, because it was supposed to make it easier to get to the materials a particular user was interested in. It was something like a recommendation system – except that it didn’t work very well. It displayed movies or series that, based on the algorithm, should appeal to us.
Maybe it was a matter of not having a sufficient database of material, or maybe the algorithm itself was poorly designed. Either way, people were not using it.
“We have withdrawn the Surprise Me feature on Netflix for users around the world. We will continue to review available ways to discover content that our users will want to watch (…)”
If few people used it, it’s pointless to support it. On the other hand, the idea itself seems good, so maybe the problem was with Netflix, not the users themselves. Either way, the feature is disappearing from the platform.