I went looking for a good scary movie to watch last October on Netflix. You'd think this would be easy, since they have a massive online repository of movies you can rent, and it spans just about everything that's ever been released on DVD. I started with one horror movie I had heard of, then started leaping through the recommended similar movies.

You'd think this would take me down a pretty big rabbit hole. But I ended up seeing the same few dozen movies over and over again. Even if I went back and started with a different movie on the fringes, I would always eventually wind up seeing the same few dozen movies again.

There's probably a good reason for this, and I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that Netflix makes more money on people who just watching streaming movies on Instant Play as opposed to people who get the movies in the mail, which require a physical copy of the DVD that must be purchased, then mailed each time. So, they've probably architected their system to steer people towards the movies they have available to watch instantly.

People regard software as being impersonal and soulless. 99% of the time, if the business people and programming people are communicating effectively, it isn't. There's usually some logic that's intended to push people in one direction or another.