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After more than a decade, the era of user-submitted reviews on Netflix has come to a close. The streaming giant has now removed every customer critique ever written, a move that comes a little more than a year after it did away with its five-star rating system in favor of a simple thumbs up/thumbs down approach.
The streaming service deleted all user reviews of TV shows and movies from its website on Friday. The company announced the move last month and stopped allowing customers to leave criticism or praise under a program title on July 30.
User reviews on Netflix will soon become a thing of the past. According to a CNET report, Netflix will remove user reviews from its service this summer. The removal rollout will happen in stages: by July 30, you won't be able to write new reviews for shows and movies on the streaming service. By mid-August, you won't even be able to read existing user reviews.
According to a company email, user reviews saw "declining usage over time." Netflix is therefore canceling the written reviews, and the company said it has "notified members who have used the feature recently."
This removal comes nearly one year after Netflix replaced its earlier five-star rating system in its apps with a simpler "thumbs up/thumbs down" system. The company claims that the new system is easier to use and that it also produces more accurate personal recommendations for shows and movies. It also may drive viewers to watch more content. According to a Variety report, Netflix saw a 200 percent increase in ratings by users with the "thumbs up/thumbs down" system during its testing.
To access SyncSketch, navigate to our SyncSketch URL where you will be prompted to enter your Netflix-provided username/email (e.g. @netflixparner.com or @prodicle.com) - if you do not hold or know your account, reach out to your Netflix VFX Point of Contact-. Click "Continue".
This section will go over how to set up a MANUAL SYNC review session (without Flow Production Tracking integration).
*If you are using Flow Production Tracking integration, then ignore this section.
The below section will go over how to set up a review session AUTOMATICALLY (with Flow Production Tracking integration). If you are utilizing our Production VFX Media Review workflow, please follow these steps.
If your project is integrated with the Netflix Studio Review Flow Production Tracking site, please follow the below steps to export notes/annotations. This will export notes and annotations to Flow Production Tracking. If you want to share notes externally, please follow the manual export option above.
User reviews have long provided Netflix users an opportunity to see what others thought of a movie or series and gain some insight into content before they committed time to watching a program. However, the reviews did little to enhance the broader Netflix viewing experience. And, in a statement to Vanity Fair, a Netflix spokesperson said that it never incorporated good or bad reviews into its suggestion algorithm.
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Which rating system you choose will depend on which one of these factors is most important to your product. A 5-star rating system may be perfect for influencing complicated buying decisions, while a simple thumbs up/down may be better for your algorithm.
And stars ratings are often accompanied by qualitative reviews, which further aid deeper considerations. This is not only important for retail purchasing decisions, like on Amazon, but also for complex decisions with real-world consequences. Think: Booking.com (choosing a hotel room), Rover (finding a petsitter), Zocdoc (choosing a doctor), etc.
On Etsy, that personalization is a little more straightforward: Users can save items or sellers to their favorites, both to create a self-curated collection of most-loved items for future purchase and to influence the suggestions they see from Etsy.
More user engagement (which is a great outcome in and of itself) means more data that can be used to provide ever more personalized UX. The result is a stickier, smarter product experience that only gets better with time.
In what may have been a response to a marked increase in negative ratings for their original content, Netflix has removed user reviews entirely. July 30 marked the final chance for fans to offer public criticism of shows like Orange Is The New Black, Master Of None, or Bojack Horseman, at least via the Netflix website.
Unlike competitor Amazon Prime Video - which recently announced a quality over quantity focused initiative - Netflix has been pumping out original content as often as possible since House Of Cards debuted in 2013. From original TV series to films to stand-up comedy specials, the streaming service has been attempting to drift further and further away from licensing pre-existing content by filling the site with its own material. The ease at which content creators have been attaining Netflix deals allows for new voices and stories to be heard that may have otherwise lacked a proper platform. Unfortunately, as the amount of Netflix originals has increased, the user ratings of those originals have been on a consistent downward trajectory.
Having produced many high quality shows and movies over the years, Netflix is arguably doing itself a continual disservice by pumping out a constant stream of what many deem low quality content. Now, with the removal of its user reviews, fans will have even less of an ability to discern the likes of the critically acclaimed Beasts Of No Nation from a movie like The Do-Over - an Adam Sandler vehicle that was widely regarded as awful.
In an attempt to create a large library of their own content and become less reliant on pre-existing content, Netflix is creating a deep forest of subpar material in which their higher quality content could easily get lost. Perhaps by spending more time on pre-production and opting to focus on quality over quantity, Netflix could change the culture of their service. Otherwise, disappointed subscribers may eventually find themselves drifting over to competing platforms.
Netflix customers can no longer write or read user reviews for any of the content on the streaming platform. Users will have to look to other sites in order to read reviews of Netflix content. The streaming giant announced plans to scrub all user reviews from the platform last month, and earlier this week, they went through with the operation. The move comes not long after Netflix got rid of the five-star rating component, trading it in for the vague thumbs up or down rating system.
Netflix claims that the user review system was removed due to a "lack of use," which sounds a bit fishy. Before yesterday, subscribers could have seen that shows like Stranger Things and House of Cards, both of which are Netflix originals, had thousands of reviews that ran across the board from glowing, to tearing them apart. While "lack of use" could be the real reason for scrubbing all reviews from the site, others believe that there could be another reason.
Netflix's five-star rating system was exchanged for the thumbs up/down ratings right after the premiere of Amy Schumer's latest standup comedy special. The special was trashed right from the start, with many reviews coming in just to sabotage for not liking Schumer. It's believed that the standup special was being taken down in a coordinated attack by online trolls, which could have been the deciding factor to get rid of the five-star rating. Subscribers are still angry over the new system that has been in place for months, but Netflix argues that the move was done to better make suggestions for its users.
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