Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

I'm finding interesting the rating system I've created and am trying to apply with some consistency to my Pocket archive of a few thousand items. Nominally it runs from 0 to 5, though I may reserve a 6 for an absolutely mind-blowing piece.

A 0 is a net negative: you are less informed for having read it, it reduces teh intelligence of its reader.

A 1 is, generally, a simple noting of some event.

A 2 should be a general news story, without strong insight.

A 3 is a news or general interest story with strong insight, or a typical scientific paper, or an undistinguished book (generally nonfiction).

A 4 is a particularly good scientific paper, or a typically well-thought-out book.

A 5 is a document which establishes a fundamental idea or field. Claude Shannon's original paper on information theory, say.

I don't think I've run across a 6 yet, but that might be a work which ties together two or more previously unrelated fields into a common theory.

My problem has been in assigning far too many '3' class articles. I've already carved out a list to re-assess and downgrade if appropriate.

I'd also like to be able to report on the numbers for each classification, though Pocket's utter lack of quantitative reporting (I cannot even state how many articles I've collected in total) stymies this.

I am ... increasingly dissastisfied with Pocket as an information management tool.

A binary option actually has three options. Did it prompt me to rate it as bad, or did it prompt me to rate it as good, or was it bland enough where I don't want to sway the rating of it at all?

If I rate a movie on IMDB as 5-6, and maybe even 7, the possibility of me recommending it to someone "depends". In that case I might as well not rate it at all.

Ratings are inherently tricky, because we all like different things. I don't think you lose anything by going to a like/dislike system. Recommendations should be based on aggregate maps and matching you with similar viewers that have a certain overlap in ratings. That's made easier with binary choices.

IMDB ratings are only partially informative to me anyways.

I think the fundamental problem with different rating systems is that they are all one-dimensional. Maybe a two-category system, like 1-5 stars for "enjoyment" and another 1-5 stars for "quality". Or a 1-5 rating paired with a label, like "campy" or "serious", to prevent apples-and-oranges comparisons.

0: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/ash_vs_evil_dead/s02

And the rub is that not everybody uses the same projection, which means the utility of one person's rating for another unknown their projection system (the weight they give to each sub-component of the overall rating) is completely unknown.