"hanged to death"? "to apply any new learnings"?
The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
91–100 of 141 posts
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#92Data gone Wrong
Did they start hanging out with the bad kids, take up cigarettes, drinking, gambling only to progress to crack and burglaries one of which ended with our Data shooting a home owner who returned unexpectedly?
I guess I don't understand what data is. I always thought it was a set of values. And I always thought that the problem when using data was in the interpretation, and that a prudent consumer of data would always be careful to distinguish between a random sample and self-selecting sample when drawing conclusions, and then would only state conclusions couched in the language of statistical inference.
Leaving aside the question of why I should give a fuck about this supposed outrage, why does the author expect there to be a strong correlation between movie quality and the ratings on a website devoted to providing entertainment by having users rate movies?
When The Matrix is purported to be better a better movie than Lawrence of Arabia, the problems of interpretation are systemic.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#93538 is using the wrong metrics. For a movie to be truly, truly, sublimely bad, that badness needs to be recognized - people in some cases will want to watch it for its incredible badness. This means that there are going to be a disproportionate number of both 1 and 10 votes. And the winner based on this is - The Room. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368226/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
A clear conversation is difficult in the absence of a clear, canonical definition of "bad". It would be very easy for me to get a few friends together and make a 90 minutes improvised movie filmed on my phone. That would be an absolutely terrible movie, but it wouldn't be a very satisfying answer to the question "What's the worst movie?" because it would be seen by very few people and it would be made with no ambitio…
For me, "badness" is the difference between what (I think) the director thought of the movie, and what I thought of it.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#94The opposite effect, a bad movie being rated highly, also occurs. One example of this is with the film "The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1520498). This film was panned by critics on release and was a complete flop at the box office. Its IMDB rating languished until sometime last year when it began to rise. Around the same time, a bunch of poorly-worded unequivocally positive reviews showed up on the page, all following the same pattern (including one that appears to have been run through a translator and back). The rating made it up to 8.0, although it's since fallen to 7.6. If it's not the movie's production or marketing team involved in this clear manipulation, I don't know who it would be, as I can't see that this movie has any kind of cult following.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#95538 is using the wrong metrics. For a movie to be truly, truly, sublimely bad, that badness needs to be recognized - people in some cases will want to watch it for its incredible badness. This means that there are going to be a disproportionate number of both 1 and 10 votes. And the winner based on this is - The Room. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368226/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
They're not actually interested in talking about "the worst movie in history." That's just a hook to talk about what they really want to talk about: crowdsourced ratings are subject to organized groups with an agenda.
This is true. Just look at how EA was voted twice in a row as the Worst Company in America. They have problems, sure, but it's ridiculous for it to beat out companies such as Monsanto, Bank of America, Comcast, Halliburton, etc. Companies that have seriously harmed the country.
But no, a game company is the worst because a bunch of fanboys rallied to say so.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#96Data gone Wrong Did they start hanging out with the bad kids, take up cigarettes, drinking, gambling only to progress to crack and burglaries one of which ended with our Data shooting a home owner who returned unexpectedly? I guess I don't understand what data is. I always thought it was a set of values. And I always thought that the problem when using data was in the interpretation, and that a prudent consumer of da…
Everything you say is right, of course. Yet, I upvoted the story.
I thought it was indicative of a larger trend where crowdsourced data are used to illustrate a point. Like the Google flu trends articles, which have gone around HN at least twice, once when they were successful (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5040204) and once when they were critiqued (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7455307).
I work a lot with sampled data, and I have found that sampling issues can be some of the most difficult to appreciate and to quantify -- even for experts.
I guess it comes down to sampling from one distribution, P(x), when the situation you really care about samples according to a different distribution P'(x). If P is far from P', your conclusions from P can be arbitrarily bad. If you have an adversary moving P around deliberately, as here, it's even worse.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
A clear conversation is difficult in the absence of a clear, canonical definition of "bad". It would be very easy for me to get a few friends together and make a 90 minutes improvised movie filmed on my phone. That would be an absolutely terrible movie, but it wouldn't be a very satisfying answer to the question "What's the worst movie?" because it would be seen by very few people and it would be made with no ambitio…
> I could go further and make a movie that was 90 minutes of a black screen. That would be a worse movie but an even less satisfying answer. What about a blue screen? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106438/
I like drysart's criterion above (the delta-Q factor) as a way of discriminating between lowbrow but honestly-crafted crap like the usual MST3K fodder, and expensive yet incompetent crap like SW Episode 1.
But you raise an interesting point, in that there should also be a penalty for novel, provocative work that, while perhaps well-executed, rests on principles that can never be used again, so they don't advance the state of the art or otherwise leave us with any enduring influence. Works like Blue and John Cage's 4'33 would fall into that category, I think.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#98The irony is that they wanted to bury the movie on imdb, but they did such a good job that it is becoming a famous case study.
The Streisand effect.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#99Data gone Wrong Did they start hanging out with the bad kids, take up cigarettes, drinking, gambling only to progress to crack and burglaries one of which ended with our Data shooting a home owner who returned unexpectedly? I guess I don't understand what data is. I always thought it was a set of values. And I always thought that the problem when using data was in the interpretation, and that a prudent consumer of da…
Everything you say is right, of course. Yet, I upvoted the story. I thought it was indicative of a larger trend where crowdsourced data are used to illustrate a point. Like the Google flu trends articles, which have gone around HN at least twice, once when they were successful ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5040204 ) and once when they were critiqued (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7455307 ). I wo…
Statistics experts are fewer and further between than experts in other fields who use statistics to justify their decisions, and the article shows how far off base most people are...after all the author conducted numerical analysis of the database and presents their findings as facts about data and includes a rough statistical comparison of the voting patterns of the lowest rated [called 'worst'] and the second lowest rated movies.
If there is an interesting statistical result it's that the movie's rating is entirely consistent with crowd sourced predictions. The theory is that 'wisdom of crowds' results directly from diversity among those making predictions.[1] In the case of the lowest rated movie, those making predictions were unusually homogeneous, and therefore an inaccurate prediction as to the quality is unsurprising.
Again, it's all in the interpretation, e.g. there's statistical evidence that a lot of morons ranked the The Matrix.
[1] Diversity Prediction Theorem: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~spage/ONLINECOURSE/predi...
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe your observation is correct, that movies are over-rated at first, but I doubt this is wholly - nor even mainly - corruption. People who are motivated to see a movie early are the same people who are likely to enjoy that movie. This makes it natural for movies to get rated very highly when they are first released. That's just natural. If you forced people to photograph their ticket stub, I believe this could…
But some 10's and 1's are lazy indignant people. Putting an obstacle in the way of registering a rating could filter out lots of noise. Leaving people who deliberately, intentionally review movies. Those ratings would be of an entire different class.
As long as it's consistent such ratings are averaged out as a 8.2 is only meaningful in comparison to other scores.