The internet has changed a lot in the past few years, and so hasNetflix. However, as streaming becomes a more competitive industry, the company is rolling out a new feature that will let users give content a one or two thumbs up rating, depending on how much they like what they just saw.
RELATED:The Best Sci-Fi Series On Netflix (April 2022)
As a way to aid these efforts, Netflix will add the “two thumbs up” function so users can signal when they really enjoyed something. As reported by The Verge, this is so the service can continue to be “the place where it’s easiest to choose something to watch.” The company’s official statement indicates that there’s never been a wider selection of content to choose from, so Director of Product Innovation and Personalization Experiences Christine Doig-Cardet admitted this feature had been highly requested by users who felt the binary reaction was not enough.
In its earlier days, Netflix would even let users submit brief written reviews on their website that were accompanied by a star rating. However, that was scrapped years before the thumbs up or down method came to be. The new reaction button is now being rolled out and is already available on Netflix’s browser, Smart TVs, and both mobile apps on Android and iOS.
For yearsNetflix has been fine-tuning its recommendationsalgorithm in order to seduce viewers to spend more time watching content they might enjoy, but many users may feel that is not always the case, and this feature might help separate something likeArcanefrom that one movie that wasn’t bad at all. Like most tech companies, Netflix collects valuable data that helps personalize the platform’s experience for each individual, even taking into consideration predictive algorithms that try to guess users’ interests based on their age, gender, location, or even their ethnicity.
One could guess there’s still a lot of work to be done on such protocols though, as Netflix is often pretty trigger-happy when it comes to canceling shows that don’t perform quite likeBridgerton, even shortly after they have been released. Perhaps it’s likely these same methods have veered the company to invest in more anime orgame-related content like Netflix’s upcomingTekkenseries.
