I play a lot of video games, but I get my recommendations from them very spontaneously. My job requires me to stay up to date with the latest releases, and if I have any blind spots in my backlog or miss any smaller releases, there's always someone at TheGamer there to put the game right in front of me. This is how I found 1000xResist last year. But with other things it's not so easy.
My New Year's resolution is to read more in 2025 and I'm already watching a lot of movies. There are a few people on the site that I talk to about movies and get recommendations from (and give to), and I know we have some avid readers too. But no one keeps an eye on things like we do, because we're all paid to know about gaming. So I resort to lists created by strangers. And, strangers, your lists are bad.
These lists are too big
I don't mean to disagree with them. What a day it would be if a list made so much sense that I could disagree with it! These are less about lists and more about incomprehensible art experiments. What I want is a collection of similar things, grouped by a specific similarity. You know, a list. At TheGamer, for example, we have the best indie games you can play if you love animals. That's very clear – there is the catch, the reason and the list. It gives you what you are looking for.
On Letterboxd, mine and everyone's movie app, all lists are user-generated and sorted by popularity. This can be changed to the most current (or least recent) version, but that hardly helps. To be fair, Letterboxd does suggest movies that are similar to a particular film, and these are usually pretty accurate. But if you want something more curated, you're out of luck.
I recently watched The Last Stop in Yuma County, ironically on the recommendation of another TheGamer (shoutout to James Kennedy). It's a relatively small film and yet it appears in 11,000 listings. This includes “Things that piqued my interest,” which is a watchlist that contains 35,000 entries. I think my watchlist is a bit big and only contains 842 films.
Letterboxd backgrounds (34,000 entries) and film poster Deja Vu (part 3!) also cause confusion. [exclamation point theirs, but also mine because why make a three part list?] (1.9k entries), All Movies (30k entries) and 10k Movies in 90 Minutes – roughly or less, which contains, you guessed it, 10k movies.
It's even worse with popular films. “Challengers,” my film of the year, occupies 303,000 listings, including digital pollutants like “All The Movies Sorted By Posters” (separate from “All Movies” and with an additional seven thousand to bring it to 37,000), “Who Designed This Poster ” (which has no answers to the question asked and contains 5.7k movies) and The Ultimate I Can't Pick A Movie List, of which there are several and a feature that again, is reliably filled by a watchlist, not by a random selection of 8.7k garbage.
Are these supposed to be helpful?
But the worst part is that, especially with films with a little more appeal like “Challengers,” there are some lists that accomplish what I've always thought was the core purpose of a list: to group things by a specific motif so that people more of the same looking for the same can find it. For example, “Challengers” appears in “Obsession In Movies,” which has a total of 104 films to review, as well as “Films With Bisexual Characters” (341 entries) and “Brat Summer” (414 entries, on the high end of useful but not 308 films seen). If you try, these are all pretty accessible films). My favorite, however, is Thought Daughter, an extension of the Thot Daughter meme titled “Women Who Overthink Everything,” with only 48 entries. Even if you start from an unlikely starting point of just challengers, you could easily work your way through the entire list with just a small amount of effort.
I realize that the purpose of lists isn't necessarily to complete them – that was a point of contention since End of Evangelion was removed from Letterboxd's Top 250 and the Animation 100. But these lists serve no purpose. Every movie with a poster? Why does anyone care?
I recently went back to Goodreads to keep my reading resolution under control and encountered the same problem there. When we go to Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow – aka the gamer book – we first see some well-intentioned lists of the best books of the 2020s and the best books of 2022, both with 2,470 and 1,521 entries respectively feel unwieldy. Then there's Best Books Ever, with a completely uncurated list of 126,977 books – the first of which is The Hunger Games. I like it, but come on.
It's also on several lists for women born in the 1970s and 1990s, although none are in the 1980s on the first page, which just feels strange. Then it comes down to READ IT OVER AND OVER! [caps and exclamation mark theirs and definitely not mine]which contains 10,282 books. Far more than the average person could read once in a lifetime.
It seems that there is no point in all this, and I'm talking both about the lists themselves and about complaining about them. It's just another sign of the internet's increasingly isolated individualism. These lists are not intended for others to participate in or use, but rather for others to view. To be admired. Keeping these lists of all blue-covered books becomes part of your identity. And yet it's part of my everyday life to complain about everything.
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