Scrolling for something to watch is the relaxing part

For nearly a year, a founder tried to fix movie night. She built an app for swapping lists of books, movies, and shows with friends. The pitch was familiar, and she believed it: people waste too much time trying to decide what to watch.

After months of work, she concluded there was nothing meaningful to solve in that space. One reason, she argued, was that for an unknowable share of viewers the waste was not a problem to fix.

In her telling, some viewers actually want to be "spending time just scrolling and not watching something good." "It’s like they’re window shopping," she wrote. "They weren’t actually trying to find something to watch; they were trying to relax."

What she means, she argues, is that the scrolling is not a failed search. It is a way to relax on its own. As she put it, "The inaccuracy and inefficiency of the activity is priced in."

That learning came from failure, her own and other people's. Before her app, she counts, came a string of earlier show and movie list apps including Wutch and TVTime plus several others, plus restaurant list apps like Beli, Corner, Rex, Breezi, and Melon. She argues most of them were chasing complaints that were not real problems, because ordinary tools already do "an 80% Good Enough job." Phone notes handle a watchlist fine, and the built in suggestions on Netflix and Hulu find something decent for tonight.

She does think one old method still works best for finding something truly good. That, she wrote, is to "get a really good friend who has their thumb on the pulse of the culture to recommend you something." But she believes that cannot be turned into a big business, because paying for taste depends on trust in one particular person's brand, and she points to the New Yorker's One Great Story and Patreon as already covering much of that small market.

Her takeaway is blunt: if some viewers scroll to unwind, a faster way to choose misses what they came for.