Netflix Has Deleted All User Reviews from Its Website

It’s the end of another era for Netflix: As of Friday, the company has removed all customer-submitted reviews of TV shows, movies and other programming from the website.

Netflix began notifying customers of the move last month. It stopped allowing users to post new reviews as of July 30, and the company said it would purge all existing reviews by mid-August — more than a decades’ worth of user-contributed material.

Why did Netflix decide to do away with the feature? Its official position is that there has been a steady drop in usage of user reviews. But certainly many people found value in reading other Netflix members’ opinions, and sharing their thoughts, too. Popular original series “Stranger Things,” for example, had racked up some 4,000 reviews on Netflix’s site before it zapped the feature.

The real reason Netflix junked user-submitted reviews probably was based on one question: Did they spur people to watch more content? On average, it’s doubtful. And strongly negative reviews, especially of Netflix’s own original programming, may have helped drive down users’ overall perception of the quality of the service.

While Netflix has exited the game, other digital-content services and sites including Amazon, Apple’s iTunes and App Store, Google Play and Rotten Tomatoes continue to host user ratings and reviews. In fact, multiple reviewers of the Netflix app for iOS and Android continue to complain about another feature Netflix killed off more than a year ago: the five-star content rating system, which has been replaced by a thumbs-up/thumbs-down.

Netflix’s users reviews were available only on the company’s website via computers; it never extended them to mobile or connected-TV platforms. Netflix allowed viewers to rate series and movies using the now-defunct five-star scale, and reviews could be as short as 80 characters or as long as 1,999 characters.

There’s been minimal backlash over Netflix’s announcement of the phasing out of user reviews. At the end of the day, they weren’t integral to the experience. But if you want to praise — or trash-talk — anything on Netflix, you’ll now have to go elsewhere.

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