Out of curiosity, how do I sign up for goodfil.ms without a Facebook or Twitter account?
Why Ratings Systems Don't Work
101–110 of 165 posts
Re: Why Ratings Systems Don't Work
#102I knew I had seen a similar XKCD before. http://xkcd.com/937/
That is because xckd is the same 3 jokes repeated over and over.
Re: Why Ratings Systems Don't Work
#103[deleted]
Re: Why Ratings Systems Don't Work
#104I like the two axes idea, although "Rewatchability" would probably be better as "How much I liked it."
There are very high quality, well made movies that I don't like, and there are some really crappy ones that I do. And that's a good distinction to see in a review system.
Because sometimes you just want to watch a good shitty movie, but it's really difficult to tell the good shitty movies from the bad shitty movies when The Brady Bunch movie (brilliant) has the same rating as any Adam Sandler movie (awful).
Re: Why Ratings Systems Don't Work
#105Would you rather go to a restaurant that has 17 reviews and 4 stars, or the next-door neighbor with 3.5 stars from 750 reviews, all other things being equal?
Yeah.
Ratings are about post-choice satisfaction, not about pre-choice decision making.
Re: Why Ratings Systems Don't Work
#106The old Latin proverb "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3... might in this context be paraphrased to "Who is rating the raters?" The hope in any online rating system is that enough people will come forward to rate something that you care about so that the people who have crazy opinions will be mere outliers among the majority of raters who share your well info…
Re: Your watchmen quote I think Amazon's "Was this rating helpful (Yes/No)?" provides a good filter for ratings. A lot of mindlessly negative reviews get filtered out by the users who come along afterwards and rate the rating in their own self-interest.
That can be easily gamed as well. If you want to boost a rating for a book, mark all of the negative comments as not helpful... In fact, I see that happen on Amazon and Newegg a lot.
Re: Why Ratings Systems Don't Work
#107I like the two axes idea, although "Rewatchability" would probably be better as "How much I liked it." There are very high quality, well made movies that I don't like, and there are some really crappy ones that I do. And that's a good distinction to see in a review system. Because sometimes you just want to watch a good shitty movie, but it's really difficult to tell the good shitty movies from the bad shitty movies…
Similarly, I've heard a proposal here on HN about having separate voting buttons for Agreement and Contributing. I might not agree with a comment, but admit it raises a good point. I might agree with another comment (or think it's funny) without it contributing to the current conversation.
Re: Why Ratings Systems Don't Work
#108The author nails it when he/she points out that star ratings don't reveal how good a movie is for you ("the movies appeal to different kinds of people"), but then goes on to propose a 2-dimensional metric that still doesn't capture the personalization aspect ("rewatchability" doesn't say much about how good a movie is for me).
IMO movie ratings should iterate on Amazon's powerful statement "People that bought this item also bought...". That is, one should look at people with similar tastes and see how those people have rated the movie.
Easier said than done as it needs a ton of data in order for it to work, but that's the only way you're going to get close to more personalized ratings.
Re: Why Ratings Systems Don't Work
#109I applaud their efforts to improve on movie ratings, but this is not an improvement. I agree with another commenter that they've really just created a 2D histogram, which is more difficult to assess than the histograms they complained about.
What's especially difficult with the scatter plot is that it requires you to assess density, rather than a simple scalar value. The other histograms have 5 numbers to indicate "weight" for each star, and a bar next to the star visually indicates the proportion the ratings received for that star. For their scatter plot, if there are 1000 ratings, how will it look different from a film with 100 ratings? The relative proportions of the ratings will only get muddied with the scatter plot approach.
The other thing about the scatter plot is that it still essentially maps to a 5 star rating, but only makes it more difficult to asses which star. That is, we are expected to visually assess: [1 star] - greatest density in lower left quadrant, [2 star] - density greatest in middle of graph, [3 star] - greatest density in lower right quadrant, [4 star] - greatest density in upper left quadrant, [5 star] - greatest density in upper right quadrant. There are only 5 useful density assessments which brings us back to the same categories as the 5 star system. Only in the scatter plot, its much much much more difficult to assess which quadrant (star) the ratings map to. And really, what is the meaningful difference between the 2, 3 and 4 stars (in my example)? Those density groupings seem almost equivalent (or some might argue). So in reality, the scatter plot will really only be meaningful if there is very little deviation between quality and re-watchability (which isn't true), which will help to group the ratings making density easier to assess. If they diverge frequently, then the plots are just going to be ignored by users since they'll have to assess density in every plot to try and make sense of it. That's hard. That's work. Users don't like to do work.
Finally, re-watchability? The question on a user's mind is, "would I want to watch this movie?" not, "if I saw this movie, would I want to watch it again?" I rarely watch movies again. Even the ones I love and own. That seems to be true of most people. The reasons for wanting to re-watch a movie are unrelated to whether it would be worth watching the first time. I'd argue that re-watching a film is more of a personality type than anything related to a movie.
Re: Why Ratings Systems Don't Work
#110The author nails it when he/she points out that star ratings don't reveal how good a movie is for you ("the movies appeal to different kinds of people"), but then goes on to propose a 2-dimensional metric that still doesn't capture the personalization aspect ("rewatchability" doesn't say much about how good a movie is for me ). IMO movie ratings should iterate on Amazon's powerful statement "People that bought this i…
Yes. The scatter plot is just a different version of how others felt about the movie. It does not communicate how that movie is related to other movies (that I have rated), nor does it inform me of how similar I am to the people who rated the movie. Personalization is missing.