People in tech business circles love this quote by Henry Ford:
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in existing ones. Like Apple creating the iPhone (sure, smartphones existed before—but cars also existed before the Ford Model T).
But sometimes, I really want a faster horse.
Netflix in 2012 was a super fast horse. It had a simple but massive catalog of movies and shows, solid recommendations, and basic library management. Compared to my limited local media library it was great. You could actively tune your tastes and rate things with a 5-star system.
This is happening because all platforms are optimising for the one single metric that matters most to them - engagement.
When you consider all users as a whole, the way to get engagement is not to have a good UX that lets you tailor what you see, and search for the specific things you are interested in. The way to get it is to shove a constantly changing and brightly coloured stream of “content” right in people’s faces where they don’t have to do any thinking or make any decisions, they just mindlessly click what is offered and consume.
From Netflix’s perspective, they want someone to go from opening the app to watching a video in 10 seconds, and if they don’t achieve that, it’s a failure which they will optimise away.
The platforms have over the years systematically stripped back every control lever you have over what you see, because control means time spent thinking, and time thinking is not time engaging.