The problem is that a huge majority of crap I bored-watch on Netflix is strictly “meh”.
It could be worse. They could be implementing the 7-9 scale.
Dude, how is “meh” not a thumbs down? I’m actually being serious. Who has time for meh’s these days? Aren’t most of us old enough to value our time more than that?
I’m kind of okay with this, since it’s going to be a Rotten Tomatoes rather than Metacritic aggregate. I don’t mind not being able to nuance my opinion, since I already know that. What I don’t know is how most people feel about a movie. Forcing them into a binary system makes for a more meaningful aggregate.
-Tom
What I don’t like is that all my years of using the 5 star Netflix scale now seem to be gone.
I kind of liked it when a movie showed up that I had watched back in the 80s or 90s, and back in 2000 I had gone through Netflix’ library and rated every movie I could remember. So seeing a movie show up on Instant Watch, and see that I already gave it a rating, that was always interesting. Sometimes it was surprised. “Gosh, I thought I loved that movie, but I guess back when I first watched it, I just liked it”. Or “Ha ha, wow, I really hated Fargo back then didn’t I?”
Now all those ratings are gone. All the stuff that I had rated in the past is not show up as rated Thumbs up or down.
EDIT: Oh hey. I just checked their website on the PC, and under my account settings, under ratings, it still remembers all the star ratings I gave. I guess it just won’t show those in the app anymore.
I’d much prefer a 7-9. That would be 3 choices. Bad, Meh, and Good. If the point is for the agent system to match what you’d like, I want it to know I really, really don’t want to watch Twilight. Daredevil could get 2 stars. Something I really like such as Better Call Saul can be 3 stars.
Can I give double thumbs down, or double thumbs up? Sigh.
I think TiVo allows that? Up, up, up for really, really love it, etc…
Despise this change. Makes the rating system worthless, imo.
There is another factor to consider, with the example of Pandora brought up, and that is the granularity of categorization.
Pandora has strict up down voting at the user level, yes, but it also categorizes songs on a deeper level. It’s not just saying ‘you liked this song by Opeth, and since that is metal, here’s this other metal song by Skid Row’, it has far more granular. So it sees the complex instrumentation, the heavy guitar, melodic sections, the usage of keyboards, and instead recommends Therion as a far closer match. The more detail, the more depth to the categorization, the better a strict up down rating can work. Because it is able to see the throughline from Opeth to Dream Theater to Kamelot to Symphony X.
Same with movies. Broadly Guardians of the Galaxy and Bateman vs Superman are superhero films, but one I love, the other… being able to discern the tone differences and similarities that drive that preference is useful. But simply seeing ‘superhero’ and assuming I’d like it because of the binary ‘you like superhero movies’ is, well, useless.
The new system isn’t about your options to rate a movie. It’s about giving you information about how other people feel about the movie. It’s the difference between Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. On Metracritic, the aggregate is only as good as the data that goes into it, and that data is partly compromised by different people using different and different rating systems. Rotten Tomatoes, on the other hand, uses much more straightforward data with a completely different goal.
Unfortunately, I don’t think people understand this. You constantly hear people saying idiotic things like “I disagree with that 45% Rotten Tomatoes rating”. Really? You disagree that 45% of critics or the audience liked the movie? Those people look at Rotten Tomatoes as a measure of how good a movie is. That’s folly. That’s not even what review scores reflect! So Rotten Tomatoes – and now Netflix – tells you how widely it was liked. Degrees of liking or not liking don’t exist because they can’t be measured in any consistently meaningful way.
-Tom
I don’t think that’s what Netflix shows you. It says the movie is a 69% match. That’s not the same as saying 69% of people liked the movie. Maybe they’re saying there’s a 69% chance that I will like the movie, based on my previous ratings?
I like the idea of less granular ratings, but yes/no is too coarse.
I’m all for the hate/meh/love scale, myself. Robocop is a love, for sure. But what about an ultimately forgettable movie like Transformers 2? I certainly didn’t hate it, it’s the sort of thing you netflix on your second monitor while playing games on the primary one. But I wouldn’t say I loved it, either. It’s a meh.
I got very little use out of the 1-5 star scale on netflix, beyond looking at my own past ratings that I forgot. I am in favour of showing the actual rotten tomatoes rating and then the % of netflix users that clicked thumbs up or down on a title. I am also in favour of them linking to any Qt3 threads on a movie or TV show and summarising the general sentiment of the discussion.
What if I simply like or dislike a movie?
That’s a 5 star scale. hate/dislike/meh/like/love. I don’t find the difference between like and love particularly meaningful. Hate/meh/love is where it’s at.
Opinions on rating scales are of course entirely subjective, but the way that I look at it is that the amount of pleasure my brain derives from entertainment can be represented on a continuous interval between 0 and 1.
Thumbs up/down or like/dislike puts a point at 0.75 of that interval and another at 0.25. No matter what my true feeling is, mapping it to like/dislike means that at most the rating is 0.25 away from my true rating. But it will rarely happen, as most things I watch are not perfect or abysmal but somewhere in between.
Having a hate/meh/love scale puts a point at 0, a point at 0.5, and a point at 1. Even though there’s a whole extra point, it’s still true that at most the true feeling is 0.25 away from where its mapped to, and I argue the average distance will be larger because many titles cluster around 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75.
The only loss with up/down binary choice is that for really great titles, the kind that make you feel passionate, all you can do is click a lousy thumbs up on the screen as opposed to a love heart or a big fat gold star that you might be able to do in yours. The solution, I think, is that if you love something that much the real way to express love is to post about it here or email friends/family that they need to load up netflix and watch it.
Yep, with TiVo, you can do up to 3 up/down
Maybe we can measure certain chemical releases and quantify this…
Now if only I can stick dopamine and endorphin measuring devices in my brain.
I can’t say I ever pay attention to Netflix ratings, except to the extent that they feed into what it foregrounds for me. But I don’t usually use those “Because you watched…” lists anyway. If I’m not pulling something from my permanently bulging My List, I just browse the Recently Added list, or for a specific title, or sometimes a specific genre using that handy browser extension.
I don’t use their ratings to find movies anymore, that’s true enough. Back in the day when they had nearly all movies, when they were a disc service? That was when I used their ratings to find movies. Because back then 4.8 stars meant that Netflix thought I would love a movie. That was extremely rare, and so I usually took the bait, and I don’t think I was ever disappointed, so their algorithm worked well back then. I’m not sure what they did during the last few years, but their ratings stopped corresponding to how much I liked a movie.
That’s a perfect scale to me. Basically covers the whole range. Thumbs up/down is just too restrictive.
It was actually hate/dislike/like/really like/love.
I always bunched “meh” in with dislike, as it should be. Anything I thought was “meh” never got 3 stars from me. Only things I liked got 3 stars.