Okay, for the record, let me say that I luuuv Netflix. (In a totally manly, platonic way, of course. Like how I luuuuv my Colt 1911 or my XBox.) However, this morning while checking my feed reader I found out that Netflix didn’t love me back. Imagine my how crushed I felt when I learned that Netflix was treating me like just another cheap trick. How else do you explain this?
A screen shot of Netflix's RSS flood of more than 1000 dummy entries in their New Streaming Movies feed.
See, Netflix was kind enough to offer up RSS feeds (here) for things like New Releases, Top 100, and yes “New Choices to Watch Instantly” aka new movies added to their streaming movie collection. However, now this morning they dumped more than 1,000 entries into the feed. And when I say more than 1,000, let’s just say I’ve been keeping my finger on the “page down” button a while now and that “1,000+” indicator you see on the left hasn’t budged. I could (and probably will) just tell Google Reader to mark all as read. The problem is that I have no way of knowing whether or not the last 500 in the list are legitimate movies or more dummies.
Also, WTH are these movies doing in the feed to begin with? For that matter, WTH is Netflix doing with them at all? Can you imagine someone getting paid to make these entries?
Really, Netflix get with the program and clean up your mess.
For what it's worth, moments after posting my rant I reversed the order in Google Reader from "Oldest" to "Newest", confirmed that the most recent entries were still sample entries, and wiped the whole thing. It's still pretty annoying though.