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. "Netflix customers were able to leave reviews on Netflix.com until mid-2018, when reviews were removed due to declining use," the company's help site now says for entry, "How do I post reviews on Netflix?"
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.
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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