About those weird Netflix genres

The hippest story on Twitter right now is how Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic discovered the 76,897 genres Netflix uses to classify its movie offering. Some examples of these weirdly specific genres include Critically-acclaimed Cerebral Independent Films; Feel-good Movies starring Elvis Presley and Coming-of-age Animal Tales.

Madrigal explains how straightforward it is to navigate all the genre pages on the Netflix website by incrementing the id in the url. But then he mentions that he retrieved the genres using «an expensive piece of software called UBot Studio that lets you easily write scripts for automating things on the web». Surely a few lines of Python code could’ve done the job? In fact, I guess you could probably extract the subgenre structure and the genre elements - region, adjectives, time period etc - with nltk and regex.

Never mind that, though. Madrigal’s article is an interesting read. Here it is if you haven’t read it yet. And here’s a critique of Netflix’s algorithms by Felix Salmon of Reuters, who argues that its recommendations are no longer about quality but about offering more of the same. You watched one Dark Political Movie from the 1980s? Then we’ll show you some more Dark Political Movies from the 1980s.