Laura Michet's Blog

Weird, Madness, Chaos

Letterboxd has a very strange feature on their account stats page which shows you the "nanogenres" you have watched the most in the current calendar year.

Perplexingly, the stats page does not explain what a nanogenre is. You have to go this Letterboxd blog post to learn what a nanogenre might be, and surprise: it's kind of bullshit. They are working with a market research firm to slap adjectives on movies.

Nanocrowd groups films based on the language that audiences employ when describing—both in Letterboxd reviews and elsewhere online—the themes and moods of the movies we consume.

Basically, they word-clouded our reviews, or something. I'm sure that this might be useful for some market researchers under certain conditions, but Big Data has never done anything for my movie-watching life, particularly when the big data is trying to recommend me a movie. I often find the algorithmic stuff on big video streaming platforms to be distracting and overwhelming - I can easily get stuck scrolling a horizontal row of Netflix covers for, like, fifteen minutes, and fail to watch anything because it's all so homogenous and the breadth of choice overwhelms me. Instead, I build a Letterboxd watchlist almost entirely off of my friends' recommendations (or sometimes their negative reviews!) and use that to guide me. Getting away from big data recommendations was one of the reasons I started using Letterboxd in the first place.

The nanogenre stuff has been particularly funny to me because it's such a profoundly useless feature compared to the other stuff on the site. I often find the nanogenre list to be a pretty uniform slurry of barely-distinguishable "categories". For example, this year, my list of lists is:

If you held a gun to my head, I could not tell you what this information is supposed to provide to me. Many of the lists sound highly similar to one another. Five of the six "Powerful, Unsettling, Fear" movies - Obsession, Mickey 17, Bugonia, No Other Choice, and The Bone Temple - are in the eight-film "Weird, Madness, Chaos" list. 5/6ths or 5/8ths are heavy overlaps. I genuinely don't know what the point is in asking me to consider the difference.

Anyway, I copied out all the lists. Here are some other stupid facts about my dumb lists:

I think this big data tool is just trying to find ways to tell me "you watched Bugonia, Mickey, 17, No Other Choice, and Twelve Monkeys." However, I've watched 53 movies this year, so I'm not sure why it's focusing so closely on these movies! It fails both as a recommendation tool (the nanogenres don't recommend anything new when you click on them) and as a tool for reflection. I do not need to be told eight times in a row that I watched Bugonia. I already know that I watched Bugonia.

I am very lucky to have lived the kind of life where nobody ever asked me to make a useless feature like this! I've had a lot of coworkers whose jobs were basically useless-feature make-work programs, though. If I close my eyes, I can see the the kind of team which births these misbegotten features. They're more common than not!

However... this stuff DOES makes me pretty curious to learn why this feature is so useless and unhelpful - on, like, a statistics level. Does Bugonia simply tend to generate more word-cloud-relevant words than other movies do, with a higher rate of consistency? Do Letterboxd users - they do have a reputation, don't they? - simply review movies like Bugonia more frequently and at greater length than they do other movies? How difficult would it be for the Letterboxd staff to increase the diversity of the movies recommended by this useless feature? They shouldn't, of course. That seems useless. But what techniques would they use?

Anyway, here's my results for your perusal. Maybe the real gift Letterboxd gave me today is the opportunity to share them, and to get mad at them for no good reason:

"weird madness chaos"

"powerful unsettling fear"

"powerful storytelling vision"

"shock twisted cruel"

"comedy bizarre crazy"

"intense storytelling captivating"

"moving captivating profound"

"earth philosophical future"

"comedy inventive unexpected"

"terrifying intriguing confusing"

#letterboxd #movies