When not even your Community Manager is clear about what kind of jokes he can make to encourage users, there is no doubt that you are facing a serious problem. And Netflix, given what has happened in X, it is obvious that it does not realize one of the serious obstacles it will encounter to continue growing. What exactly happened on Twitter?
The Netflix profile on X usually posts funny messages, some memes, and advertises the latest releases. Lately he has been giving a lot of attention to his particular return from Sálvame, but the truth is that it is not the most worrying thing or what has gone wrong with one of his latest publications.
From joke to big mistake
It all starts with a joke, a simple one. We imagine that the person who was thinking about her was trying to connect with Netflix subscribers. Because that’s what you usually do when you want a social post to go far and receive a large number of views, likes and, in this case, RTs. The problem is that he didn’t think very carefully about what he was saying. As you yourself can see in the image, the shot backfired.
Netflix Spain
@NetflixES
Send this to whoever it concerns. https://t.co/LWFYIZRxGV
October 27, 2023 • 17:16
1.3K
twenty-one
The joke tells itself. Post a graphic headed by the phrase “Things you do on Netflix” and divide the cheese into three possible answers. The joke is designed so that one of them is what we all do, because that way you connect with the subscribers and everyone laughs. So the three options he proposes include two that have practically no percentage in the total of what we do: “go back 10 seconds because I was on the phone” and “pause to go to the bathroom.” And the option that takes the entire percentage, with applause included, is “Choose movie.” Oh really?
Netflix, it’s not funny
Have you laughed? Personally, I didn’t find it funny at all. Netflix recognizes, jokingly, that what we do most on the streaming platform is spend time choosing movies. The worst part is that it’s totally true, but not funny. That is to say, if Netflix’s competition or someone who was thinking of making fun of the service and putting their finger on the sore spot published it, it would be funny. But the fact that the platform itself publishes it on its Twitter profile is totally surreal. Perhaps they are not aware that this is one of the great and serious problems that the service has.
Because Netflix is loading up on content in an extreme way. “Everything” ends up on Netflix, sooner or later. It was recently announced how the platform was signing checks to acquire the licenses for many of the series and movies from its rival platforms. It’s great for these: Netflix pays them to get rid of things that they don’t care about not having in their catalogs or that they don’t mind sharing. And Netflix continues to expand its catalog without stopping. Since the way the service’s categories and listings are divided is so terrible, what we users do is browse and browse through the endless list of thumbnails without finding anything we want to see.
There is no general list through which we can navigate from beginning to end to see absolutely everything (even though there are hidden categories to see more listings). That is something that is available on Disney+ and that, at least, helps reduce the time we spend choosing. But no, Netflix pushes you to make the time you spend on the interface extreme. You go from Comedy to Action Movies or categories with absurd titles in which you find again the same movies that were in the category you had been watching before. And time keeps moving forward and moving forward… without choosing anything. Look at the screenshots we include and how the same movies are repeated in different categories.
When you’ve spent at least 10 minutes looking for what to watch and discovering Turkish series that you didn’t even know existed, that’s when you realize that you have a serious problem with Netflix. In the end, the only thing that works is to go see the premieres that everyone sees, access the top 10 or go back to the movies that you already have on your list and that you play over and over again when you’ve gotten bored of searching. But Netflix should not laugh at its problem, because it is something that has been criticized on many occasions and is surely causing the platform to lose hours of playback.
The only logic we would see in all this is that Netflix ends up putting advertising on the interface and that, while we are deciding what to watch, they show us ads. That would explain everything. Who knows, maybe they are already thinking about doing it and that is why they are happy with users wasting so much time trying to choose a movie.
