Early Netflix was great. I stopped pirating. I guess it has been a good 10 years but it’s back to the high seas now.
Having access to every Star Trek ever was great, but Netflix’s recommendation algorithm was top notch. It gave me things I would never have sought out but loved anyway.
But since Netflix started just pushing their own shit, regardless of whether I’d like it or whether I’d already watched it or whether it was literally cancelled by Netflix it’s enshittified to the point I don’t know why I still pay for it.
As somebody who has been using Netflix since before they even had streaming as an option, I think a lot of people really over-inflate how good the offering was in the early years of their streaming unless you just loved watching reruns of cable television from the 90s and 2000s.
Make no mistake, the offering now is worse. But it’s not like it was truly a central, low priced hub for everything you wanted to watch.
It wasn’t just the content, it was the delivery of watching whatever you chose whenever you chose and wherever you chose for a reasonable monthly fee. Even without a massive catalogue it was 1000 times better than cable and the existing services that charged stupidly high fees for on demand temporary access.
It did have a lot of movies in addition to the series though, even if I had seen most of them because they started with the popular ones.
Honestly, what I miss most about early Netflix was the insane library they had of documentaries
