(2014-01-05) Netflix Microgenres

Alexis Madrigal has identified 76,897 Micro Genre-s defined by NetFlix. Classic Tag Intersection explosion. Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness... Todd Yellin said that the genres were limited by three main factors: 1) they only want to display 50 characters for various UI reasons, which eliminates most long genres; 2) there had to be a "critical mass" of content that fit the description of the genre, at least in Netflix's extended DVD catalog; and 3) they only wanted genres that made syntactic sense... As a thought experiment: Imagine if FaceBook broke down individual websites according to a 36-page tagging document that let the company truly understand what it was people liked about Atlantic or Popular Science or 4chan or Viral Nova? (Could Del.icio.us do something interesting with their messily-created Tagsonomy?) (How about if LinkedIn did it for people? Go beyond "skills"?) No one — not even Yellin — is quite sure why there are so many altgenres that feature Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale. It's inexplicable with human logic. It's just something that happened.

Jason Bailey questions the real point. Are Netflix’s sub-genres a bold and innovative attempt to, as the headline promises, “reverse engineer Hollywood?” Or are they a laughable attempt to serve up hyper-targeted C-movies based on dubious connections to other things you’ve viewed? This viewer leans towards the latter. I wouldn't be surprised if they re-jigger their lists (or rather, keeping adding new micro-genres, and change their recommendation-weightings) based on A-B Test...

There was already a blog manually identifying some weird examples.