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Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

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Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

#261

Post by shiftb »

pizzetta wrote: post #74

As I posted in the dupe: This saddens me. >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 That's not incongruous to me. The stars are not about "enjoyment" factor, they are about perceived quality. I may have a go to cheap ice-cream and rate it 3-stars but rate a good affogato 5-stars and only have it once in…

Some friends of mine used to have a movie rating site which asked two questions:

1) How good was the movie? [1-5]

2) How likely are you to watch it again? [1-5]

I think it was too many questions to ask, but trying to separate out the enjoyment from the quality struck me as a good idea.

Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

#262

Post by spdionis »

bubblethink wrote: post #244
nissehulth wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, the simple answer is "yes". I used to use a VPN to watch US Netflix, but they started to block known VPNs and I didn't feel like spending time on workarounds. On the other hand, downloading the latest episode of some TV series takes only a few mouse clicks. For sure easier than fighting geo-restrictions. I still pay for Netflix, but doesn't really watch it much because of the tiny catalog available to me local…

>Sadly, the simple answer is "yes". >I simply want to support them. Nothing to be sad about. Also curious, why do you want to support them ? Being a market leader, Netflix is a unique position to influence some of these regressive practices. More support is clearly not helping; it's only making it worse by creating monopolies that exert even more negative influence.

The biggest problem with Netflix is that it is not able to obtain rights for a lot of movies or series so you don't have a full catalog. So series and movies are fragmented between providers or totally unavailable​.

Netflix is not much of a market leader until it contains at least 90% of the movies i want to watch, which can't happen without enough leverage from their part given by user support.

Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

#263

Post by karlshea »

bad_user wrote: post #227
karlshea wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly one of the only reasons I keep it is because I have so many movies that I've rated and didn't want that time investment to go to waste. I guess now that isn't going to be a factor.

Why on earth would you use Netflix as a rating service? First of all their library lacks a lot of great movies, or info about the movies they have. Netflix isn't IMDB.

Almost all of the ratings I did were back before they even had a streaming service and the library was great. Plus it was helpful to get good recommendations. Now it doesn't really matter, but all of those ratings are locked in.

I've looked before halfheartedly for a way to export them but now that they cut the API off it doesn't seem like there's a great way to do that.

Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

#264

Post by meesterdude »

dexterdog wrote: post #183
minimaxir wrote: post #140

It's about damn time. 5-star rating systems are broken . A 1/2/3-star rating is effectively a dislike, and a 4/5-rating is effectively a like. In the big data sense, a deviation from a 1-star for dislike and 5-star for like is statistically meaningless. (and this is universal ; star ratings on Amazon Products and Yelp Locations have the exact same distribution ). The interesting part of this is what Netflix gains fro…

The problem is that is your opinion of a 5-star system. Everybody approaches them differently. Some people give everything they like 5 stars, everything they kind of like 4 stars and just don't vote on everything else. Some people just do 5 for like and 1 for dislike. The 10-point system on IMDB is even worse.

but that's the problem with 5-star systems - everyone uses them differently. Like/dislike leaves little room for ambiguity.

Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

#265

Post by eiopa »

I understand people who want more expressiveness in their reviewing, but the reality is that the 5-star system just leaves too much ambiguity.

It's like how in Uber/Lyft, most people just default to 1/5 star ratings. In that case, the average rating a driver has to maintain gets skewed to a a pretty high number, like 4.5, and people who think "oh, this was a pretty good ride! 4 stars!" end up unintentionally boning the driver.

Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

#267

Post by nissehulth »

bubblethink wrote: post #244
nissehulth wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, the simple answer is "yes". I used to use a VPN to watch US Netflix, but they started to block known VPNs and I didn't feel like spending time on workarounds. On the other hand, downloading the latest episode of some TV series takes only a few mouse clicks. For sure easier than fighting geo-restrictions. I still pay for Netflix, but doesn't really watch it much because of the tiny catalog available to me local…

>Sadly, the simple answer is "yes". >I simply want to support them. Nothing to be sad about. Also curious, why do you want to support them ? Being a market leader, Netflix is a unique position to influence some of these regressive practices. More support is clearly not helping; it's only making it worse by creating monopolies that exert even more negative influence.

I do like some of their own content. I also like their general business model and I believe (well, I hope) that the stupid geo-restrictions are results of old-school licensing and not active business decisions made by Netflix.

But ofc, I wouldn't mind if they had some real competition, I don't want a monopoly.

Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

#268

Post by sundvor »

always_good wrote: post #192
TeMPOraL wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> implicit signals such as - 'did the user watch the show / film to the end?' I hope their version of that signal is better than what they're presenting in the UI. I have a few movies Netflix shows me as not finished, becaue I closed them just as the ending credits started.

Also, it seems incredibly delicate. Upon finishing the final season of Dexter, I clicked on an episode in the first season to look up something. I jumped to the 18 minute mark and watched about 10 seconds and closed the tab. Now Netflix asks me every time if I want to continue watching Dexter from where it now thinks I left off in season one even though I spent a whole year watching all of the seasons. So I have the…

The UI... They can't even make an 'f' shortcut key in the Win10 app (app, not browser) to go fullscreen.

And they force 21:9 movies to be played back inside the 16:9 portion of a 21:9 ultrawide monitor, with massive black borders as a result where there should be none.

I'm seriously unimpressed with Netflix as a company, for what they do with all their resources. Sometimes the MVP just isn't good enough.

Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

#269

Post by bubblethink »

nissehulth wrote: post #267
bubblethink wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sadly, the simple answer is "yes". >I simply want to support them. Nothing to be sad about. Also curious, why do you want to support them ? Being a market leader, Netflix is a unique position to influence some of these regressive practices. More support is clearly not helping; it's only making it worse by creating monopolies that exert even more negative influence.

I do like some of their own content. I also like their general business model and I believe (well, I hope) that the stupid geo-restrictions are results of old-school licensing and not active business decisions made by Netflix. But ofc, I wouldn't mind if they had some real competition, I don't want a monopoly.

>(well, I hope) that the stupid geo-restrictions are results of old-school licensing and not active business decisions made by Netflix.

Geo-restrictions have existed forever. What Netflix started was actively blocking entire ranges of IPs belonging to vpns and commercial ISPs (cloud providers like aws, dedicated servers like ovh etc.). This should fall under some corollary to net-neutrality where a service cannot discriminate between ISPs. Does such a corollary exist in countries that have some form of net neutrality (US, India, Netherlands etc.) ? Can someone with legal expertise comment ? From my standpoint, they can have geo-licensing, but should stick with some consistent way of showing content either based on billing info or IP. Blocking out vast portions of the internet because it doesn't suit them should clearly be some violation of laws like net neutrality.

Re: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

#270

Post by bcbrown »

curun1r wrote: post #148
yladiz wrote: post #70

I feel like star ratings, if just given in general, are pretty useless for anything that has multiple qualities. For example, maybe I like the cinematography of a movie but I think the acting is shit, or maybe I think the taste of the beer is nice but it's too acidic or sour and wouldn't work with specific foods because it's overpowering. Airbnb does this pretty much spot on, in that they ask for 1-5 stars for five c…

> I feel like star ratings, if just given in general, are pretty useless for anything that has multiple qualities. This is only true when those star ratings are taken out of context. Individual reviewers can have completely coherent star ratings that are very useful for making determinations. The golden age of Netflix discoverability, for me, was back when they added social networking features. I connected my account…

> Netflix doesn't weight those ratings any more highly than the 5-star ratings of someone who rates nearly everything as 5 stars.

Is that fact or speculation? It's a common recommendation technique to find the mean rating for a person, and use that to normalize. Normalized score = (actual_score - mean_score + 2.5) for a 5-point scale, for example.

I have no insight into whether or not Netflix does something similar, but I'd be surprised if they don't.

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