Did Netflix delete user reviews to save face?

Authored by dailydot.com and submitted by sambachi

Last month, Netflix made good on a promise to do away with its user review platform and deleted all reviews from the site. Netflix claimed at the time that people weren’t leaving as many reviews. But according to a report from streaming site Cordcutting, the decision might have had more to do with the increasingly bad reviews its original programming received.

Netflix has made a big show of aiming to release close to 500 original series, documentaries, and movies this year, but such a massive increase in content has resulted in a noticable decline in quality.

While Netflix saw a spike in originals in 2017, Cordcutting found that since peaking in 2012, user ratings for original programming consistently declined, reaching their lowest point in 2018 following a 24-percent drop. Cordcutting used data collected from Netflix before the July 31 user review cut-off.

A Netflix rep told Variety last month that “Writing a ‘bad review’ never had any bearing to whether a title was recommended to other viewers or not,” but the timing of the decision is interesting. Still, viewers will have other outlets to express themselves: While critics panned one of Netflix’s recent original series, Insatiable, last month (right after it stopped allowing new reviews), people managed to game Rotten Tomatoes and boost its audience score to 83 percent.

We’ve reached out to Netflix for comment.

Teiresias666 on September 7th, 2018 at 18:14 UTC »

Netflix's biggest sin in my book is their UI. Extremely frustrating to navigate their content through a weird scrolling parade of useless categories, and every time you pause for 2 seconds on ANYTHING it immediately starts playing full audio full video content at you. I have to mute the TV every time I browse netflix, it drives me nuts. Just because I want to read the synopsis of something doesn't mean I want it to autoplay

Omegastrator on September 7th, 2018 at 17:33 UTC »

Andy Bernard does not lose contests, he wins them...or he quits them because they are unfair

Tasteful_Dick_Pics on September 7th, 2018 at 17:31 UTC »

The thumbs up/down system is just terrible.