The Solution to Endless Scrolling When Deciding What to Watch

You finally have a moment to yourself and decide you want to watch a movie. You get comfortable on the couch, grab the remote, open up your favorite streaming platform…and realize you have no clue what to watch. You end up scrolling for 20+ minutes, unsure if you really will like each show or movie you stop and read the plot of. Frustrated, you eventually give up and watch another rerun of a sitcom you’ve seen many times before. We’ve all been there.

Twenty or thirty years ago, most people watched movies and television selected from a finite basket of options. The biggest shows were on the major cable networks, and movie theaters or Blockbuster were your only options for finding movies. If you wanted to travel off the beaten path, you could try to find a low budget theater or scour the dark corners of Blockbuster. These options were limited. With the advent of the internet, this has all changed.

Now, Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services give you access to hundreds of movies that may not have been in theaters or available OnDemand. You can watch shows that previously would have either never been aired or would have only been shown on a smaller channel at 1am. You can even access amateur-made shorts and series from creators that got their start publishing content for free on Youtube or other similar sites. Nowadays, whenever you sit down to watch something, you’re selecting from an almost unlimited database of content.

This same technology has also led to the creation of several resources available to make sense of all this consumable content. You can find unlimited articles from supposed experts with tastes inevitably different from your own. You can browse Netflix’s suggestions for you. You can look movies up on IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes to see how their critics feel. All of these resources, plus all of the available content, make “what do I want to watch?” harder to answer than ever.

In this new age of choice, many different companies are hard at work figuring out how to direct consumers to content they will like. Netflix actually employs people to watch their movies and shows and rigorously “tag” them with descriptive indicators to try to understand what you might be responding to. Their suggestion algorithms then combine this with your viewing data to sort you into one of over a thousand different categories of viewer, so they can try to pick what you like most.

The main reason these types of solutions don’t work well in art is that your taste is too subjective and variable to predict. We can like a movie or show for so many different reasons that drawing correlations from the available data is impossible at this point. Because Netflix (and experts, and raters at IMDb, etc.) don’t know YOU, they have to start from the content of the movie and work backwards to try to predict which selections you’ll like best. For this reason, a recommendation from a friend or family member, for you specifically, is still the most reliable source of information for finding something that you will like.

That’s our philosophy at Reklist. You already get these valuable recommendations all the time. Sometimes you put them in a note on your phone, sometimes it’s in a text thread, sometimes you’re simply sure you won’t forget. Reklist stores all of these recommendations for you so they’re all in one place for when you’re ready to watch. You can send recommendations (“reks”) to friends, sort your Reklist with lists and filters, rate movies you’ve watched so you’ll remember better when someone else brings that title up again. Reklist allows you to cut out all the noise and start with the highest value data: trusted recommendations from people that know you best.

About Reklist

Reklist is a centralized place to send and receive entertainment recommendations (books, movies, shows, podcasts, and music), keep track of what you have read, watched, & listened to, and discover new titles. We have an Explore page with tons of recommendations to browse, a Newsfeed where you can view, like and comment on your friends’ activity, and a My Reklist page that allows you to keep track of your recommendation list (“Reklist”). Reklist also has a ton of other cool features, like providing detailed information about titles, where exactly you can find what you want to read, watch or listen to, and more!

This article contains paid promotion.