Keywords now displayed on the IMDb iOS and Android apps

@Peter_pbn​ Great suggestion, thank you. We will pass this on for consideration.

@bradley_kent​ 

mike is not suggesting that opera and operetta are the same thing, but that opera could be listed as opera-music like operetta is listed as operetta-musical.

opera-music is slightly problematic because opera is a performance form as much as a style of music. The list of subgenres already has classical-music, which would include opera music.

I don't agree that opera is a subgenre of musical.

Opera could also be added as a genre.

Such music OUTSIDE performance is usually called "classical-music" or "operatic-music."

In a cursory way, I keep coming across subgenres that now can only be miscategorized as "Other." Isn't "anime" a subgenre of Animation?  Isn't "cinema-verte" a subgenre?  "mockumentary?" "neo-noir," a subgenre of Film Noir?  (It's now only an "Other.") "neo-screwball-comedy," a subgenre of Screwball Comedy? (I did a gargantuan separation of such titles a few years ago that took a lot of time and conscientious persistence,)

And, then there are many supposed subgenres that probably have ONLY a few titles, like "lo-fi-sci-fi," "fake-documentary" (to be merged with "mockumentary," or are they two separate subgenres?). Etc. Etc. Etc.

Before this program was instituted, one of the first steps that should have been undertaken was to identify all valid subgenres that already exist in the database, and not just to rely on the new, and occasionally dubious subgenres.  They are only a small part of valid subgenres that already exist.  (Isn't "tragedy" a subgenre of Drama?)

As to OTHER choices in the Category drop-down menu, there needs to be something like "production-techniques" to cover things like "time-lapse-photography," "slow-motion-scene," "cgi," ""montage," "long-take," etc., and perhaps something like "literary sources" to include keywords like "based-on-novel," "based-on-comic-book," "french-literature-on-screen," etc.  These may not be the best names for a category.  I'm sure that someone else can come up with better category names to cover these "non-plot" keywords..

Anime was relisted as anime-animation, mockumentary as mockumentary-comedy, tragedy as tragedy-drama. The old keywords remain, but I doubt we have arrived at the final result just yet.

"-animation," "-comedy" and "-drama" are all redundant.  Again, just one of the problems with the "new" subgenres.

Thanks all for the great suggestions!

Regarding some of the subgenre suggestions (we will follow up on others):

• We have now enabled farce-comedy as a subgenre in the contribution interface. It will also be added to the Help article.
• Giallo is currently categorized as a subgenre of thriller.
• We haven’t made any changes to psychotronic keywords as part of this launch (they are not currently classified under the subgenre category), but please let us know if there are specific keywords that should be merged here.
• You are right that the genre suffix for subgenre keywords is awkward. You are also right that some subgenres don’t have a strong correlation to specific genres (e.g. “epic-”). We still see this as a worthwhile trade-off given the consistency and structure it provides. However, this launch of a contributable category field could provide us more freedom to evolve the format in future. We will continue to evaluate this.

Regarding the category suggestions:

• We had been thinking about exploitation, avant-garde etc. One option is to categorize them under something like "Niche". We are curious to hear opinions on this.
• Production techniques, literary sources and geographical settings are great ideas. We had also been thinking about some of these.
• Other potential categories include Mood (e.g. dark/uplifting), Brand/Franchise (e.g. Marvel Cinematic Universe), Plot Environment (e.g. desert/space), Occasion (e.g. Thanksgiving/Halloween).

There are lots of opportunities to make keywords more digestible with further categorization. We also recognize that there are trade-offs as we add more categories - not least the work to categorize them. We plan to learn a bit more from the limited set of categories that we have launched before exploring these new ones.

In the meantime, it is fine for such keywords to live under the categories of Plot Details or Other. In general, if it describes a detail about the plot, then it should be under "Plot Detail". If it doesn't fit into any of the supported categories, then it should go under "Other". As mentioned, "Other" keywords are only shown on the subpage in the apps, although as before they can appear on the main or subpage on web (which doesn't have any categorization yet).

Again, the use of a genre as a suffix is , yes, awkward, but, more importantly, repetitive, redundant,  and absolutely unnecessary.

@mike​

Regarding the "psychotronic" keyword, I was not intending to imply that staff made any changes. It looks to me like over the past week, a contributor has either mass-manual-deleted that keyword or converted it to "psychotronic-film," "psychotronic-series," etc.

I dislike these keywords anyway, but I had actually been contemplating proposing the exact opposite idea: merging all "psychotronic-" keywords into the "psychotronic" keyword.

For those who use this keyword in keyword-combination searches (and I know for a fact people do exactly that, since I have seen people post those searches online), it would be better to simply use the keyword "psychotronic" rather than "psychotronic-series," "psychotronic-film," etc., so that more keywords can be picked up in combination with each other in a single search. 

Besides, the "-series," "-film," etc. suffixes of these keywords replicates other information in IMDb that can be filtered via searches. In other words, if all these keywords were merged into "psychotronic," then users could filter the results by feature films, TV series, etc. -- that part does not belong in the keyword itself.

In conclusion, I would still recommend mass merging all "psychotronic-" keywords into the single keyword "psychotronic." 

There is no need for staff to take that action now, since I can include it in a future public list. 

In the meantime, if anyone opposes my idea, it would be good to know the reasons why. 

The "-(feature)film," "-short," "-series," "-episode" suffixes are valuable.  I have searched them when programing films for a senior center.  Years ago, when teaching film, I would have appreciated them since time constraints always affected the films that I was selecting.

Also, they are just valuable for recording film history.  Perhaps "-web-series" and "-podcast" need to be treated in the same way.

Such keywords are a much easier search tool that what has been suggested.

@bradley_kent​ 

When you search for "psychotronic-film," "psychotronic-short," etc., why can't you just search for "psychotronic" and then if want to filter by Short or feature film or whatever, just filter your search results in that way (using the data already available on the IMDb site)?

The filtering should not be done within the keywords themselves. Doing it that way bifurcates the keywords and short-circuits keyword combination searches, unless the filtered keywords and general keywords (e.g., "psychotronic" and "psychotronic-series" are retained together, side by side on the same title).

The overall best solution is to just use the single keyword "psychotronic."

Imagine if every single keyword involving subgenres and styles were compartmentalized like you have done with "psychotronic." We would end up with "bikersploitation-series," "bikersploitation-short," "bikersploitation-film," etc. keywords, and then repeat all those combinations for every single subgenre/style keyword.  All of that is completely unnecessary.

But more importantly, it interferes with keyword combination searches. This is the main problem here.

For example, if you want to search for the keywords "psychotronic," "ghost," and "woods" together, you should be able to do that search to get all the applicable titles, and then if you want to filter it out by TV series, film, short, or whatever, you can add that to the search. But if you don't want to do that filtering, you should be able to search for these keywords together in a single search.

With your approach, you would have to do multiple searches, and there is no single way to combine all of those multiple searches into a single search (or a link that can be shared with others).

In other matters (for example, genres), you have been a big proponent of not using keywords to duplicate data that exists elsewhere. Why are you advocating for the duplication of data within keywords here?

As a recent example, IMDb staff recently concluded that keywords shouldn't contain "tv-movie" within the keywords.

If "tv-movie" within a keyword is not allowed, why should "-series" be allowed within a keyword?

I really hope you don't start manually editing all the other subgenre/style keywords to break them down by series, film, short, episode, etc. That would be a lot of wasted time that would, in the end, only be counterproductive.

It all seems to depend on HOW you want to do your search, whether exclusively using keywords or combining keywords with genres.  Also, some "short" films have no running time, no "short" designation in the keywords, and rely only on the genre designation.

Also, "psychotronic" is a standalone adjective.  Standalone adjectives should generally be avoided In keywords since one cannot then know what that adjective is specifying.

@bradley_kent​ 

I'm mainly talking about multi-keyword-combination searches. That's the main problem created with your approach of bifurcating these keywords.

To solve this problem, there are two potential solutions. First, all titles that have keywords like "psychotronic-series" and the like could also have the keyword "psychotronic."

The second, preferred option is that there should not be any keywords like "psychotronic-series" or "psychotronic-film" at all, and instead only one keyword ("psychotronic") is needed.

Sure, "psychotronic" is an adjective. But it's also an understood genre/style that will be recognized by people who are familiar with it -- and especially if it is designated as a subgenre keyword or whatever IMDb's new system is for those types of keywords. It's the same with keywords like "avant-garde," "experimental," etc. None of those keywords should be banned just because they are adjectives.

@bradley_kent​

BTW, "giallo" is also a standalone adjective, and it's not even in English, so it has two strikes against it as a keyword. Would that mean you are also going to slice and dice the keyword "giallo" up into "giallo-film," "giallo-short," etc.?

Your approach in favor of keywords like "psychotronic-short" seems very much at odds with your approach against genre-infused keywords.

There is no keyword "short." Nor should there be any keyword like "psychotronic-short," "independent-short," "experimental-short," etc. All of those keywords should be merged into their counterparts "psychotronic," "independent-film," "experimental," etc.  One day I will likely propose a set of mergers like this in a future list.

@mike​ 

• You are right that the genre suffix for subgenre keywords is awkward. You are also right that some subgenres don’t have a strong correlation to specific genres (e.g. “epic-”). We still see this as a worthwhile trade-off given the consistency and structure it provides. However, this launch of a contributable category field could provide us more freedom to evolve the format in future. We will continue to evaluate this.

As I understand it, IMDb is currently only accepting keywords as Subgenre keywords if (1) the keyword includes a genre as a suffix and (2) the keyword has been added to a pre-approved list by IMDb staff.

I would encourage the staff to expand the list of pre-approved Subgenre keywords. As you acknowledge in the sentence I have bolded above, now that we have the ability to submit a keyword as a Subgenre keyword, that should obviate the need for including a genre suffix in all subgenre keywords.

The following keywords should be added to the list of pre-approved Subgenre keywords (and should be retroactively designated as Subgenre keywords where they have already been applied):

giallo (1913 titles)  

exploitation (2329 titles)

exploitation-film (995 titles)

sexploitation (1483 titles)

sexploitation-film (922 titles)

italian-exploitation (317 titles)

psychotronic (24 titles) 

social-guidance (215 titles)

nunsploitation (138 titles)

bikersploitation (45 titles)

teensploitation (267 titles)

drugsploitation (47 titles)

creature-feature (1247 titles)

rape-and-revenge (1369 titles)

women-in-prison (289 titles)

grindhouse-film (2416 titles)

slimehouse (1130 titles)

shrekcore (144 titles)

b-movie (4279 titles)

z-movie (856 titles)

euro-trash (852 titles)

sleazy-giallo (251 titles)

candy-cinema (252 titles)

gay-cinema (414 titles)

lgbt-interest (265 titles) 

lgbt-cinema (389 titles)

queer-cinema (502 titles)

lgbt-film (51 titles)

lgbtq-film (29 titles)

surrealism (10982 titles)

avant-garde (2848 titles)

experimental-film (4740 titles)

experimental (3846 titles)

chop-socky (517 titles)

kung-fu-classic (309 titles)

kung-fu-comedy (22 titles)

mockumentary (2433 titles)

hillbilly-horror (165 titles)

police-drama (17 titles)

period-piece (662 titles)

alternate-history (442 titles)

postmodern (330 titles)

docufiction (38 titles)

docusoap (128 titles)

cult-film (5073 titles)

cult-classic (358 titles)

mature-animation (1142 titles)

anime (6064 titles)

buddy-movie (242 titles)

satire (6400 titles)

shark-feature (129 titles)

sharksploitation (117 titles)

sex-horror (221 titles)

erotic-horror (78 titles)

urban-horror (71 titles)

lgbt-horror (57 titles)

retro-horror (106 titles)

gothic-horror (297 titles)

horror-for-children (205 titles)

australian-horror (315 titles)

japanese-horror (247 titles)

american-horror (210 titles)

christmas-horror (164 titles)

classic-horror (147 titles)

british-horror (107 titles)

arthouse-horror (57 titles)

neo-noir (4033 titles)

softcore (14169 titles)

sitcom (2385 titles)

eurospy (225 titles)

@keyword_expert​ 

forest-adventure was removed from the subgenre list in July, as I documented.

@Peter_pbn​ Seems like it should go back on the list. It definitely shouldn't be categorized as a Plot Detail. 

@keyword_expert​ 

Yes, but I have an iPhone.

@Peter_pbn​ I figured it out. I simply needed to update my phone's installation to the latest version of the IMDb app.