from Hacker News

A directory of Netflix's “secret” categories

by garrettboatman on 1/11/16, 4:14 PM with 85 comments

  • by mpdehaan2 on 1/11/16, 8:02 PM

    It would be nice if Netflix made it easier to browse content rather than choosing what categories to display and show to you.

    It can get stuck thinking your really like a genre, and the recommendation engine can penalize you too much for too many likes or dislikes.

    Now that the website is a bit more focused towards streaming-on-computer it's somewhat harder to browse and prepare a queue.

    It feels that some content is cheaper to stream and it wants to present that content first, and also that they don't really want you to be aware of the size of the catalog either.

    Tempting to go back to DVD plan for a while, really, which I would do if the US Post Office was remotely reliable. If only there was a way to rent-stream BlueRay/DVD ISOs securely to a Netflix app, and have their whole catalog legally available and not bifurcated into streaming and non-streaming, that would be really cool.

  • by joesmo on 1/11/16, 8:58 PM

    It'd be nice if these categories weren't hidden, but at this point, the Netflix UI has gotten so useless that if the service was a little more expensive, it wouldn't be worth the price. Basic UI features that I'd expect from even an alpha quality service like filtering by star rating simply don't exist. Up until today and this post, proper categories did not exist. The whole Netflix UI experience has consisted of scrolling through endless lists of garbage to occasionally find one or two interesting movies/shows. And when I say garbage, I really mean garbage: movies with one or two stars, deservingly so.

    I understand that if Netflix allowed filtering by star rating they might only list a few hundred 4 and 5 star movies across the whole service, but it'd be best to let the consumer decide how to deal with that fact rather than hiding everything in a giant pile of shit. I find their star ratings to be very close to accurate and this is the strength of the service. Unfortunately, their discovery UI is so horrific, it negates any strength Netflix has otherwise. If I know what I want to watch, Netflix is great, otherwise I prepare for half an hour of scrolling the same bullshit list of crap looking for anything decent and ultimately giving up.

  • by sandworm101 on 1/11/16, 6:30 PM

    The best shows are those that don't fit a particular category, or that grow to move between categories. Lots of great british TV bounces between comedy and drama (sherlock, cuffs). Some American shows cannot be pinned to a specific age range (simpsons). I still laugh when I see TopGear listed as "informational/other" by my cable company.

    Also ... (i just noticed)

    Australian Movies 5230 Belgian Movies 262 Korean Movies 5685 Latin American Movies 1613 Middle Eastern Movies 5875 New Zealand Movies

    No Canada? No Canada comedy, no Canada movies, nothing? Belgian but not Canadian? Look to the end of your favorite shows. Look for the "Canadian film tax credit" statement before saying there aren't any canadian shows.

  • by Zikes on 1/11/16, 6:07 PM

    I don't understand Netflix's aversion to letting me find shows I'm interested in. It's so hard to just browse the full catalog, even by really general categories like "Action" or "Comedy". When I pull up the Netflix app on my console all I get are 20-25 movies in each category, plus my Queue and a few recommendations.

  • by fastball on 1/11/16, 9:22 PM

    Most of these categories aren't 'hidden'.

    If you select one of the main genres on Netflix, almost all of them will then have a "sub-genre" picker which, as far as I can tell, includes most if not all of these.

    Sure, this site lets you see them all at once without having to choose a parent genre first, but it doesn't seem like that big of deal.

  • by ctdonath on 1/11/16, 8:35 PM

    There's a whole lot more than the OP lists. Things like http://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/5614 "Movies starring Kyle MacLachlan" and http://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/5612 "Comedies from the 1920s".

  • by davidclopez on 1/11/16, 8:16 PM

    | Satanic Stories 6998

    What a missed opportunity.

  • by bhaumik on 1/12/16, 2:01 AM

  • by glitcher on 1/11/16, 8:33 PM

    I've always longed for better filtering/sorting options on the home screen. Currently I believe you have to go into one of the category screens to have sorting options.

    My other pet peeve with Netflix is the duplication of content across several of the home screen categories. Some are almost identical at times, just in different orders.

  • by NathanCVoss on 1/11/16, 11:38 PM

    Just by guessing a couple numbers I found more: Goofy Crime Movies: http://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/10001

  • by Ennergizer on 1/14/16, 7:51 AM

    Netflix Secret Categories are also available in Simkl for Netflix Chrome extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simkl-for-netflix-... with random Netflix search and watched\to watch filters

  • by aaronsnoswell on 1/12/16, 3:15 AM

    Can someone explain what this is? Non-netflix user here.

  • by petke on 1/11/16, 8:22 PM

    I got existed for: "Dark Comedies 869". Man its difficult to find these kinds of movies. Unfortunately there was not 869 of them but just 6. I have seen them all. One of them was amazing; "Sightseers" if anyone wants a movie tip.

  • by amag on 1/12/16, 9:25 AM

    Nice! I've missed this since Netflix started to dumb-down the list of categories displayed for a movie a while back.

  • by mschuster91 on 1/11/16, 10:56 PM

    Eh, anyone here by chance who knows how to watch the Avengers movies and the Men in Black movies in Germany? They don't appear in the catalog, but searching shows "Based on The Avengers" and the other MCU films, for example.

  • by joshmn on 1/12/16, 8:12 AM

    Time for a Chrome extension.

  • by overcast on 1/11/16, 6:59 PM

    Should have removed the ?ref=producthunt , since this posted on Hacker News.