As my VIP is about to expire, I felt the need to explain why I don’t see myself getting it again. Trakt is built into the fabric of my day and is far and away the best means I’ve found to not only keep track, but discover new things to watch. That said, “best” is a relative term, and more often than not the gripes erase what might otherwise be an enjoyable experience and turn it into feeling like chores or an exercise in patience.
Loading. I feel like I’m always waiting for something to load. When it doesn’t load, like the grid feature in looking at shows, you’re left with a broken site or open question if it’s supposed to look that way. You can feel the perhaps creative desire to provide “fresh” or “new” ways to look at or interact with the data, but if it works at all, it’s unclear what purpose it would serve unless it stopped you from clicking into more pages that needed loading.
I thought I’d find the stats for the “Year in Review” more interesting and accessible. It obviously only nominally trakts what I’ve input and from when I began, but with the amount of times it has bugged/erased when I’ve watched something, it’s frustrating to think I’m supposed to look at my “history” which is really whatever “fix” of dates I’m claiming to have watched a series. I watched the entirety of One Piece in a few years. I can’t draw on that time period and tie it to anything else going on in my life after it glitched my views. I like to estimate if/when I’ll be able to experience giant pieces of work like that. I can’t anymore.
It never “flows.” It’s several clicks to even record things, add the pauses and loading, and if you’re watching multiple different things, add the traversing between pages to discover one of the shows was hidden, unbeknownst to you, or refuses to display an earlier episode as next to watch because you caught one later in the series first.
If I try to add something to the watchlist…does it add? I can’t tell how many shows don’t display on my calendar or disappear altogether after attempts are made to add them at different times.
I wish I knew how my watching habits compared to others. I wish the system for protecting against spoilers was more robust. I wish I could view more shows at once and organize them in a way that made sense for what I’m watching as it’s airing verses what I’m watching “on the side.” I wish the search worked. I wish all of the extra and mis-labeled redundant entries for things like Derren Brown or mini-movies we condensed. I wish the run-times were acurrately depicted. I wish well before all of the third party-integration updates, the basic bones functioned in a fun and smooth way.
I wouldn’t feel particularly moved to say anything, but I finally paid. I finally said this hobby and this information was meaningful enough to me to deserve money and a kind of attention I don’t pay to many things. What am I paying for? I almost lost the data entirely! Can I export it somewhere?
I have to sign in and out sometimes 3 times to record things when it wants to loop me and say “You’ve already signed in.” I have to sometimes go on a dozen click parade to remove a single play because trakt can’t accurately display if something has been watched. It doesn’t seem capable of parsing seasons for shows like Ridiculousness or The Challenge when it has off-shoots.
I bought trakt so I could copy lists, see the year in review, and do some of the busy work in refreshing pages that were not up to date. I’d still like to not encounter junk pages that are confusing, redundant, and wrong and not have to pay for the privilege to report or fix them. It just feels like after 8 years, a lot of the “learning stages” things have never been fixed if ever addressed.
I’ll never bother with trying to get it to read my “collection” again, that was a joke. I also don’t bother with Plex or Kodi and auto-scrobbling. It can barely seem to manage getting the majority of shows and movies accurately displayed, let alone discern the truth of what you’re doing with various episode titles or folder designations. Things people have been in don’t even display under their profile or a phantom extra-entry shows that you haven’t watched it when you swore you have. You can’t get a person added to the cast with ease. There appears to be no rhyme or reason behind what constitutes a “guest” star.
I don’t know how to not just list complaints. What’s good about it? I can, mostly, keep track of what I’m watching and review my history. That’s what I need it to do most and do well. I want to feel like my data is safe and accessible, and the thousands of hours I have spent with shows or across the platform aren’t incidental to the site’s identity and how it thinks it should function.
I’m glad I caught the guy asking if he could pay more. That’s the thing. I would/want to too. I feel like I’ve carried on and on about what is otherwise a free service. I’d rather all of the above be rendered mute for some seemingly-stupid-to-pay premium, but would change the fundamental nature and experience of my time on the site. When the site went down, I kinda made my peace that it could all be gone. I didn’t expect backups or the stuff of the last couple weeks to get restored. The folly of how much time I’ve spent trying to collect and organize all came to a head and I started conceiving of my data in the terms laid about by my folders and downloads and backup service I pay for.
I want “better,” but I don’t know how to support a service attempting to do what feels like way too many things at once, and none of them in a particularly compelling way. That’s not me trying to be mean or judgmental, just kind of sad, as Trakt is a persistent browser tab like my email, reddit, and budget.
