Which only goes to show that recommendation systems need to be separated from the vendors whose wares are being recommended. There's a huge conflict of interest here - so of course recommendations will be biased towards what the platform makes most money on. This applies not just to Netflix, but also YouTube.

As it is, these systems are just in-house banner ads in disguise, and as trustworthy as any other ad.

For a recommendation system to work in the interest of its users, its profits would have to be completely uncorrelated to the recommendations it gives. In a more sane world, platforms would have to accept such third-party recommendation systems as first-class citizens, to be used in lieu of whatever the platform offers.

What Netflix wants to be popular also tramples over what I am already watching. I find that the UI gets in the way of enjoying several programs that I am part way through by pushing something new. If they want to continue to make series and only get me to watch half of the episodes then the algorithm is spot on.

That said, Amazon Prime video is so much worse. It suggests that I would like to watch series 1 of a show when I have watched it and am part way through season 2.

To their defense - their catalog in some countries (like mine) is so small that I was able to just ... browse through the whole offer in 10 minutes.

I've managed to binge-watch everything I liked in two months (while working full time remotely) and cancel Prime.

With such a small catalog suggestions will mostly be wrong, as there isn't enough content to fill the whole suggestions tab :)

Which makes you wonder why they even bother with suggestions in the first place, instead of doing the obvious thing: giving you a searchable list of all movies they have for your region.

Given that the former is a major engineering project, while the latter is a junior-level interview question, one has to assume they're trying to confuse their users on purpose.

Nah, it's presumably because they just lift and shift the US code to whatever new region they're in, without actually investing any thought into it.

This is a recurrent problem with US based services, as residents of the USA tend to forget that they are a very large country.

iirc amazon video owns their own recommendations distinct from the rest of the company, where previously recommendations were generated from the standard retail systems. I'm convinced that they got worse when this change was made but this is purely anecdotal.

I'd like a way to filter out the Netflix Originals too.

The problem with this is that Netflix Originals apparently gets slapped on stuff that Netflix bought post-production or financed as a co-production.