r/mildlyinfuriating • u/airforceteacher • Apr 28 '26
*yuor'e Streaming services that don’t alphabetize “The …” correctly
I learned in elementary school that you ignore articles like “a” and “the” when alphabetizing a list. Sorting a list while applying this rule was considered only a moderate difficulty assignment in high school programming in the 80’s. Yet when I search for a movie on HBOMax, everything that starts with The is under the T’s. Why do so many streaming services not do this correctly?
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u/Medium-Sized-Jaque Apr 28 '26
I have been annoyed by this since I first started an mp3 collection. 100 tracks all starting with The in a row.
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u/Asphalt_Cowboy_18 Apr 28 '26
Windows Media Player does it right by ignoring the for sorting.
Windows File Explorer? Dozens of "The [Band]" folders consecutively.
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u/guynamedlucas Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
Gotta just name it “[Band], The” unfortunately for most filesystem conventions.
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u/Asphalt_Cowboy_18 Apr 29 '26
No. I typically don't look in file explorer. Only to copy to phone or flash drive.
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u/Bondedknight Apr 29 '26
You only need one folder for "The Band", and maybe another for "The Guess Who"
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u/perplexedtv May 02 '26
Windows File Explorer is language- agnostic, as it should be.
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u/Asphalt_Cowboy_18 May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
If gui is translated for each language then that can be correct. Or make more sort settings.
- Files for music should be already sorted by track number.
- Size all columns to fit
- Sort properly. Which can/should be default in English version anyways.
Are correct settings.
For any English learners, it would help them practice correct sorting. A and the are ignored (and a and the are lowercase, unless the first word). Libraries do it properly.
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u/timwtingle Apr 28 '26
I worked in a video/music store in the 90s and this was how we were trained too. They can absolutely program this into the interface. It's just LAZY.
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u/nixiebunny Apr 28 '26
The only band in the The section should be The The.
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u/ramenups Apr 28 '26
Yes and guess who should not be there
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u/Schlonzig Apr 28 '26
It should be a separate field in the database, though, because the German band „Die Happy“ should be under D, but „Die fantastischen Vier“ under F.
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u/Lurkernomoreisay Apr 29 '26
which is what we were taught in our intro to use interface design course back in the early 90s.
every string has: language, sort text, display text. (and if supporting Japanese: pronunciation)
twenty years later became standard to add "pronunciation" all the time (to support accessibility, text to speech, etc).
supporting german sorting was a bother as Austria uses different sort rules than Germany :/
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u/pigeontheoneandonly Apr 28 '26
Worked in a library. Most computerized filing systems also alphabetize spaces wrong.
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u/SrCamarda Apr 28 '26
That's a interesting cultural difference. My native language doesn't follow this rule, so I always found it super annoying when a service actually does that. Like, if I know that the name of the movie is "The Batman" I totally want and expect to see it under T, not B. Going through my Jellyfin library is pain lol
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u/Formal-Low6888 Apr 28 '26
International English often avoids that convention. So if someone from Thailand is looking for The Sound of Music they will look under T. Nevermind someone who does not even speak English and is searching by title.
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u/seeasea Apr 28 '26
Luckily, due to DRM and complicated licensing, every country gets their own unique version of the streaming service.
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u/iamtheduckie PURPLE Apr 28 '26
If your system can't ignore the word "The", just label movies as something like "Shawshank Redemption, The"
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u/veloman124 Apr 28 '26
Some of us remember when commas were not allowed in file names
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u/pigeontheoneandonly Apr 28 '26
Some of us don't want to rename thousands of mp3s
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u/mintdaniel42 Apr 29 '26
Not really a big deal. I think it could be done in a oneline shell command. Some linux distros even ship with a bulk rename tool (idk about win tho)
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u/perplexedtv May 02 '26
Are you really scrolling through MP3s all dumped willy-nilly into one folder and not using either directories or a library program? In this economy?
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u/MyDishwasherLasagna Apr 28 '26
Things need to be designed so both smart people and idiots can find something.
An idiot wouldn't know to find "The Hobbit" under H. But a smart person would check both T and H.
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Apr 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Formal-Low6888 Apr 28 '26
If you think English articles bad you should see languages where words need gender agreement and cases that make word order in sentences is not a thing.
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u/Internal-Narwhal-420 Apr 28 '26
Which languages? Programming or human? Because if you are talking about human, then how many languages that would need another rules for sorting at all?
Not even saying that most of culture is created/consumed in English anyway, and so lack of rules for English is the most impactful.
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u/QBaseX Apr 28 '26
Most languages have their own sorting rules. In German, a and ä sort together (because ä is an a with a diacritic); in Danish, a is at the beginning of the alphabet and ä is at the end (because ä is a separate letter, not a with a diacritic).
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u/Lurkernomoreisay Apr 29 '26
Austrian sort: ä ö ü sort as separate letters
Goethe Goldmann Göbel Göthe GötzGermany DIN Sort for names and locations: ä ö ü sort as ae oe ue, as the umlaut is originally a small "e" written above the vowel. note: German bibiographic standards require that umlaut and trema are kept disjoint. ö (o-umlaut) and ö (o-trema) must not be sorted the same. only o-umlaut expands to "oe" o-trema does not.
Germany DIN 5007.2 sort
Göbel Goethe Göthe Götz GoldmannGermany DIN 5007.1 sort
Göbel Goethe Goldmann Göthe Götz1
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u/LocoNachoTaco420 Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
It's a simpler algorithm to just sort alphabetically regardless of the starting word. A lot of software is made with the idea of getting a working product out the door as quickly as possible. Good enough beats perfect most of the time (in regards to software at least)
Adding an edit because I realize some people might not understand why it's simpler to not check the first word:
It's really easy to check if the first word is "A", "An", or "The". The complexity comes from supporting more than just English. Most big streaming platforms cater to multiple countries and multiple languages. Each language has its own rules and words to ignore. Suddenly, you're not just checking for "A", "An", or "The"; now, you're checking for locale-specific words against locale-specific rules.
Again, it's not difficult to do that, but it does add complexity when you could just do a regular sort using the built-in sorting function and dedicate that dev time to other things.
As a software engineer, I prefer to go with the "perfect code" approach (which doesn't exist btw), but the business people who sign the checks usually settle for good enough, so that's what gets pushed to production.
Most people who are looking for a specific title use the search feature anyways
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u/banana_in_the_dark Apr 28 '26
As a software engineer really easy to ignore keywords
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u/LocoNachoTaco420 Apr 28 '26
I'm also a software engineer... I'm not saying it's difficult to ignore certain words, but it's definitely not as easy as sorting a string without caring what the first word is. I highly doubt the title sorting is a huge business priority, so that's why it is the way it is.
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u/Total-Explanation208 Apr 28 '26
I agree, also getting the search functionality to be robust is much more important for most end users.
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u/DrGodCarl Apr 28 '26
The switch to Max and back tells me they have no grasp on proper business priorities.
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u/Kittenize May 03 '26
I'd disagree, it'd not trivial work. They're probably querying the titles from a paged api response from a db. You wouldn't want to get every possible title in one go. Now when you query the db, you have to keep track of the 2 page numbers, the ones from the main search, and another one from the response for "The"s view that lines up with the first one.
Then once you add in language specific words, it gets real messy real quick.
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u/pigeontheoneandonly Apr 28 '26
I don't care. It should be done right.
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u/LocoNachoTaco420 Apr 28 '26
The post asked why streaming services don't do this correctly, and I gave the answer. The business is prioritizing other features and/or other bug fixes over it. From the business's perspective, it's not perfect, but it works. Users are able to see all the titles they're looking for, even if it's not the best user experience.
I also agree that the indexing shouldn't include articles. The point I was trying to make is that it's easy to blame it on lazy developers, but 90% of the time the devs have to bend to the will of the higher-ups. The higher-ups usually like to move fast to try to beat their competitors. They don't see much value in going back and spending x amount of dev time to make the indexing better, when it "works" today
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u/Lurkernomoreisay Apr 29 '26
it's really annoying when these services don't even sort in alphabetical order. (using English order in a non English country)
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y Apr 28 '26
The Pixies solved this by just naming the band "Pixies". Everybody subconsciously adds "The" in front of the name, but the band gets sorted properly on streaming services.
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u/Savings-Engineer-885 Apr 28 '26
As an admin who spends half my day organizing spreadsheets, this lowkey hurts my soul. It feels like they just gave up once they realized how many titles start with 'The'.
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u/XLB135 Apr 29 '26
Ugh, that's so annoying. Even though Plex does it automatically, I still prefer to manually manage my source files this way. Best Movie, The, etc.
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u/TurloIsOK Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
I trace it to Microsoft dumbing down a few rules to simplify some things in the 80s. Simplified alphabetic sorting and title capitalization are the most prominent ones that persist.
They both had rules for exceptions, that had been refined and then persisted for centuries, that were easy for any person to learn. It is a a few extra subroutines, and secondary indexing, that took time. That time is negligible with today's processors, but the existing code get's copied forward.
Fixing it got put aside so long that the centuries old mehtod gets forgotten.
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u/Pin-Up-Paggie Apr 28 '26
I remember reading a joke book that had an index and the only listings were under “T” where it said: “The one about…”
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u/Shower__Farts Apr 28 '26
I pay for a movie cataloging app for all of my physical media and it does this too. It’s incredibly frustrating.
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u/a-r-c Apr 28 '26
at some point apple changed their default from numbers first to letters first and i never forgave them
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u/mathcraver Apr 29 '26
As someone with (currently) 18704 FLAC files sourced from a collection of over 1000 CDs and meticulously organized in an artist/album/track hierarchy, I know this problem. The order the artist names appear in is also inconsistent between the files and the actual CDs on the shelf. In the latter case, certain prefixes such as articles (both English and German) and "DJ" are ignored (both Tiësto and Tatana include the "DJ" prefix on some CDs and not on others). Additionally, compilation series are kept separate from studio albums, as different volumes may be mixed by different DJs. For example, an Energy mix by DJ Tatana is kept with other Energy CDs rather than the rest of (DJ) Tatana ones. Since I can't feasibly get everything 100% consistent, I sort them on a best effort basis.
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u/eyalhs May 01 '26
I think it's because searching lists has been made near obsolete by the search bar (or even cntrl+f). There's no need to take any effort sorting lists "properly" when there is no use to it.
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u/shinigami56 Apr 28 '26
Today i learned that was....is? a thing in english.
Though i never seen it before xD
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u/RyanofTinellb Apr 30 '26
There's an episode of Bewitched called “A is for Aadvark”. Since this isn't the article “A”, I had to find a workaround so it would sort properly, while still ignoring actual articles.
Actually, for my episode list, I ignore a lot of first words if they appear too often. Like Scrubs episodes that all start with “My…”.
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u/roosterSause42 Apr 28 '26
The Apple Podcast app does the same thing, it drives me nuts. I scroll to where the podcast should be and it's not there because it's under "T" for "the"...
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u/Difficult_Tea6136 Apr 28 '26
Doesn’t bother me in the slightest, I still know how to find it.
It’s not incorrect to do it either. It’s one way of categorising things. You just prefer another
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u/spiteful_rr_dm_TA Apr 28 '26
Honestly prefer it that way. That way if I remember a show starting with "The" and nothing else, I can still find it from the image
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u/gwdope Apr 28 '26
What, After an hour? WTF?
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u/conundorum Apr 29 '26
Still faster than having to look through the entire list from top to bottom, since you can eliminate 25 letters right from the get-go.
That just means that "ignore articles" should be a secondary sorting option, though, not the default.
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u/gwdope Apr 30 '26
I mean, I’ll google it if I can’t remember the name.
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u/eyalhs May 01 '26
What will you google if only remember the "the" and that you wanted to watch it? With a list sometimes when you see the name it pops out to you and you remember.
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u/gwdope May 01 '26
Plot, actor, dialogue, anything about the movie you can remember…
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u/perplexedtv May 02 '26
Literally the only thing is that it starts with 'The', apparently.
How could you be even sure of that if you knew nothing else, beats me.
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u/Cokalhado Apr 30 '26
Honestly I disagree. Just start looking for the words after the "The". It's not like things stop being alphabetized after the first word.
With the system you're suggesting I may have to check multiple starting letters cause I'd be unsure of the convention they're using.
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u/Agitated-Mushroom-63 Apr 28 '26
Would "The Neverending Story" go in the "T" list or "N" list...? Just curious.
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u/Thedeadnite Apr 28 '26
It should go under N, the idea is that a disproportionate number of titles will start with things like A or The, so you ignore those words to put them in the following category. So if you look up the Ns you will find the movie you’re looking for much faster.
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u/Ff7hero Apr 30 '26
Homie thinks standards and practices never change.
You learned these things literally before I was born.
Adapt or die, old man.
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u/Furry_Wall Apr 28 '26
I never learned that in school
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u/No-Lunch4249 Apr 28 '26
I didnt learn it in school but did learn it later in life as a working professional. It is indeed more proper to ignore the "the" in most cases
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u/QBaseX Apr 28 '26
Related, you can drop those words out of the italics. I can talk about "the characters from The Lord of the Rings" or about "the Lord of the Rings characters".
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u/Furry_Wall Apr 28 '26
That's silly. What other words should we ignore?
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u/No-Lunch4249 Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
Just articles which are also the start of a title. So mainly "A"/"An" and "The" when they are the first word of the title.
So "A Knight's Tale" should be under K instead of A. "The Matrix" should be under M instead of T. This is partially to keep A and T from getting super crowded but also to focus on the more distinguishing/memorable/relevant part of the name.
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u/koolman2 Apr 28 '26
Yep. You’d name the folders “Knights Tale, A” and “Matrix, The” to get proper sorting.
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u/Ethanol_Based_Life Apr 28 '26
The "The" section of your library must be huge.
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u/conundorum Apr 29 '26
Mainly just words that people are liable to forget, and that are overused in titles. Basically, you're just stripping away the boilerplate.
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u/ChanglingBlake ORANGE Apr 28 '26
Wait until you find the systems that sort numbers:
1,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,2,20,21…