Netflix Eliminates Friends and Top 10 Lists
All is not well in the magical kingdom of Netflix at the moment. It seems that a large number of customers are pissed off due to the company’s decision to redesign the site. While a tweak here or there might not have drawn the ire of the Netflix faithful, the decision to eliminate a few key items certainly did.
Netflix has eliminated the Friends feature, and Netflix has eliminated the Top 10 Lists. That means Netflix customers will no longer be able to recommend movies to those on their friends list or see the movies in their queues. They also won’t be able to draw movie recommendations from such user-generated top 10 lists as “Great Morgan Freeman Movies” or “The Best Family Films.”
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On a positive note, the image for each movie or TV show is bigger, and the site has an overall cleaner design. But that matters little to those who looked at the friends feature as Netflix’s version of Facebook. And it didn’t take long at all before they started sharing their displeasure on the company’s website.
And then something odd happened.
Suddenly, the over 150 negative customer comments just disappeared. While a Netflix cutomer service rep blamed in on a technical error, the wise (and already fired up) subscribers were having none of that. It was obviously a conspiracy worthy of Oliver Stone. Just take a look at a few of the comments (for the whole shebang, click here to read Netflix comments).
“Netflix customer ‘service’ in action.”
“What sort of Maoist chicanery is this?”
“You delete all of (probably your most loyal) user comments. Isn’t that a nice big middle finger to top it all off?”
“Grow up Netflix!”
“It’s so frustrating to feel dismissed and unheard and powerless, especially when you are a paying and otherwise happy customer.”
“Coach handbags are in the fashion, coach handbags and coach purses will bring you a beauty life.”
(That last one was only included to show that, no matter what the topic, someone is always only-too-happy to throw in some spam at no extra charge. )
For more comments regarding Netflix getting rid of friends and top 10 lists, you can click on this link for Hacking Netflix, a site specializing in company news and info.
While they’re still the best thing going when it comes to renting movies online, Netflix has certainly exhibited some very Blockbuster-like behavior over the last few years. Here’s hoping that trend is squashed in the near future…but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Movie News, Netflix Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.