Well, if no one else is gonna link it I may as well: https://xkcd.com/1098/
I'm all for this!
Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
31–40 of 298 posts
Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
#32What's next. Just a thumb up like on Facebook? Rating is a hard problem. No system works universally well. IMDb (Amazon property) for example uses 10 stars, Amazon uses five stars. Facebook use thumb up ("likes"). Games ratings are often in percent 1-100% (summarized by metacritics.com and others). School systems around the world use A, B, etc or numbers like 1-5 or 1-6 for grades.
You're lumping together different kinds of rating systems. Netflix just wants to recommend you stuff you might like, which is a very different problem from scoring things on an absolute scale (grades, IMDb, game critics). Facebook likes have a social interaction component that's not there in Netflix, so it isn't comparable either.
Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
#33But the UX of the current rating system sucks. Rating stars are very small and you have to hover them to know you can rate. Only if you watch a movie to the very end you will see a clearer rating functionality, but even then you have few seconds to use. I bet many new users don't even know they can rate. I wonder if people aren't rating much because the UX sucks, not because it's a 5-star system.
What bothers me is that once you rated something you can't unrate it, or see what the public rating is.
I believe what they display is just a guess at how much you will like it (based on people with similar viewing/rating histories), not a public rating as such, so once you've actually rated it, there's very little reason to show the other figure.
Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
#34What I really want to avoid is the mediocre content i.e. 2.0 - 3.5 stars, very good and very bad can both be entertaining.. Now that mediocre content will be scattered across the two categories I really care about; I guess IMDB/Rotten tomatoes will steer clear of this ridiculous binary rating systems.
Isn't Rotten Tomatoes exactly a (aggregated) binary rating system?
Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
#35Bummer. I understand why they do it but I think it's too coarse. I'd much rather know how many people thought a movie was fantastic and not just decent.
It would be neat if they gave each user a set number super thumbs (obviously with a better name). You can use them so many times per month or year. I think month would be ideal, but if they went with the year route, make it possible to remove your super thumb like to use it on another movie.
Likes?
Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
#36> The streaming service said it had been testing thumbs up and down ratings “with hundreds of thousands of members” in 2016 – and it led to 200% more ratings being given. I don't understand why engagement is the right metric here. If someone isn't sure how they feel about a movie, why is it a benefit to have them spew their half-formed thoughts into a like/dislike rating?
Some reaction from
many has more value than
thougthgful one from few
Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
#37> The streaming service said it had been testing thumbs up and down ratings “with hundreds of thousands of members” in 2016 – and it led to 200% more ratings being given. I don't understand why engagement is the right metric here. If someone isn't sure how they feel about a movie, why is it a benefit to have them spew their half-formed thoughts into a like/dislike rating?
[deleted]
Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
#38From the linked Variety article, "However, over time, Netflix realized that explicit star ratings were less relevant than other signals. Users would rate documentaries with 5 stars, and silly movies with just 3 stars, but still watch silly movies more often than those high-rated documentaries."
But the signal isn't just for Netflix; it is also for users, who might sometimes be in the mood for something silly and sometimes in the mood for something good. Also, people might rather get more suggestions of good movies even if they are more likely to watch bad ones. (Of course, people might also just overrate documentaries.)
Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
#39What I really want to avoid is the mediocre content i.e. 2.0 - 3.5 stars, very good and very bad can both be entertaining.. Now that mediocre content will be scattered across the two categories I really care about; I guess IMDB/Rotten tomatoes will steer clear of this ridiculous binary rating systems.
I've seen so much good content on Netflix rated at 2 stars or less. Movies and TV shows are way too subjective for user reviews to be used with any kind of reliability. Or maybe I just have low standards.
Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
#40But the UX of the current rating system sucks. Rating stars are very small and you have to hover them to know you can rate. Only if you watch a movie to the very end you will see a clearer rating functionality, but even then you have few seconds to use. I bet many new users don't even know they can rate. I wonder if people aren't rating much because the UX sucks, not because it's a 5-star system.
What bothers me is that once you rated something you can't unrate it, or see what the public rating is.
I don't believe you can ever see a public rating. Before you rate a title, you can see netflix's prediction of what you will rate it, but that's not public.