I created a site so you can explore Netflix's engagement data | Hacker News Reader

I created a site so you can explore Netflix's engagement data

whatwewatched.xyz

3 points_nickanthony4 comments

Neat site and thanks for making me aware Netflix released this data. It's fun to see things like The Witcher S1 outperforming S3 given the timeframe of the data.

Some suggestions on the site:

- The dropdowns seem to have a formatting issue where the text in them shows all white except for the dropdown selection you are currently hovering over

- Given the Excel file is 680 KB you could probably just convert it to JSON and pre-Brotli/gzip the file to just serve the entire thing up to the client in < half a MB. This avoids the need for queries to run server side and also lets them be instant on the client side (+also removes any reason to paginate results as part of the query).

I really like the overall simplicity of the page. It has that old-web feel with a modern look.

Thanks for checking it out. Appreciate the feedback!

- What browser are you using? I can't repro in Chrome and Safari.

- Good tip on using gzip, I'll play around with it to see if I can get some better performance (there are ~18k rows). Netflix will be releasing these updates twice a year, so if more data gets released soon, I'll keep the database.

For browser Chrome/Firefox - but on Windows. Given Safari in your list I think you're relying on the system (macOS in your case) to provide a dark style system dropdown so you can customize the font to be white but Windows/some other OS's provide a white themed system dropdown which will result in a customized font color only giving an all white dropdown, until an entry is highlighted in which case the background for that row turns to the selected color (blue in the case of Windows).

https://i.imgur.com/FWcCsNe.png

On Tuesday, for the first time, Netflix posted their engagement data for their entire catalog. This data is for H12023 (from January 2023 to June of 2023).

However, they posted the data as a large excel file that you have to download. So, I created a website so you can explore/search the dataset without having to download the file!

I'm a believer in making data accessible and easy to explore, so it's also free. Enjoy. I'll be adding more features over the weekend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com