Here's a 1st world problem of mine.

The maximum number of items you can have on My List on Netflix is 500. This seems to be a legacy policy from when Netflix was DVD based, and was shipping items to people.

When you hit this limit, you have to remove titles from your list to be able to add new ones. This was not something Netflix told me, I had to figure it out when app/website wouldn't allow me to add new titles to my list. It didn't say what the issue was, it would just say it couldn't be added. I've later had confirmation from Netflix, that this was the case.

I didn't know about this limit until I hit it, and it's not something the UI makes you aware of in any way. There's no counter of how many titles you have on your My List. There's no indication when adding a title to My List how many are in there now. There are zero clues about this.

After reading online about this legacy policy about 500 items being the limit, I contacted Netflix support to ask if I could have the 500 items limit lifted. I was told that was not possible, and I would have to manually remove items from My List one by one.

If only My List had some kind of functionality to order the data on that list. Say, sorting by date added, watch length, whether you watched it or not. Over time I've not been the only person frustrated by this, judging from the results of searching online, and a number of people have written Greasemonkey scripts, user scripts, etc, to address this shortcoming. Unfortunately, none of the scripts I've tried are working anymore, because Netflix keeps changing their API making it impossible to get the data from them in an effective way.

I just have a single feature request for Netflix. They don't have to build any sort of functionality into My List itself, but if they could create a button for your account, which with a single press removed all watched titles from My List, that would really make my day. It would also not waste my time removing them one by one from their web interface which, at best, is as enjoyable and rewarding as watching paint dry.

#netflix #rant