Things I know I hate and aren’t good are showing up as 90%+ matches. So basically there is no longer any sort of ratings system, which means I have to scour the internet to find out if something is shit and pray I don’t slam into spoilers in the process if it isn’t.
One day some show is 2 stars. The day this comes online, 96% match.
Fucking useless.
Near as I can tell all it looks at is genres. You liked this thing from a genre, so you must like all things from that genre. Only… no. That isn’t remotely how this works. Also Netflix Originals seem to mostly be 90%+. Even ones that historically were below 3 stars.
However, over time, Netflix realized that explicit star ratings were less relevant than other signals. 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.
I find it weird that their fix to this is to make it a binary choice, rather than offer multiple tracks for ratings, e.g. some of these things:
Had a bit of a false hope when I launched the Windows 10 Netflix app. It still uses the 5 star system. I thought Netflix rolled back or something, but nope.
I was a netflix charter member from the beginning. In the beginning, I was fastidious about entering all my ratings. I even went back and spent days rating all the movies that I had watched in the 10 years previous.
What I discovered is that any recommendations that Netflix gave were complete & utter bunk. All movies are between 2.5 and 3.5 stars. Very rarely will I get anything higher than 4.0
So years ago, Netflix trained me to not to pay attention and I quit doing any kind of ratings and instead I read comments on IMDB, the occasional review on RT and believe it or not, I count what people say on these boards pretty high as well.
Most movies are watchable. I only look at ratings to stop me from watching a movie that is going to be miserable. and while an IMDB rating of 5.0 may have the occasional gem, I’m not willing to stoop to that level unless it comes on a huge recommendation from someone I know.
So, I just don’t see the utility in the netflix rating system and any changes they do won’t affect my viewing habits at all.
I did the same thing, and had the same experience. But I also thought their algorithm was REALLY good at predicting my rating. For example, when most movies are between 2.5 and 3.5, so are my ratings. Most movies are in that range. There’s very few that deserve a “Really liked it” (4 stars) or above. And when I did watch the few that Netflix that I would “really like” (4 stars or above), Netflix was generally right. And if I had time to watch all of those, I could go down to the 3.5 stars (half way between like and really like) and those were pretty spot on too.
Occasionally you had the outlier. The movie that Netflix that I would just like, but I turned out to Love it. But for the most part, Netflix did a good job predicting my rating.
I’d like to think that I give wider reviews than 2.5 to 3.5, but I’m not sure how to look at all my movies and see what my average is. In the beginning, the reason i rated movies was so that I could pull up my 5-star ratings to remind me what to recommend to people.
Looking at my ratings now, I see my wife is rating a lot of her movies in our account, despite the fact that she has a different profile, oh well, it’s not like I’ve been using them anyway. And there are a lot of movie titles of “MOVIE”, I wonder if that is a discontinued movie from Netflix?
Back to you believing it’s accurate - is 2.5 to 3.5 your new 10 pt scale where 3.5 is really good? Or did you rate movies 4 or 5?
I did rate plenty of movies 4 and 5. But back when I watched a lot of movies, I would rate most of them 2 or 3. Because most movies I either like or dislike. In that era there were very few that I really liked or loved.
And then I moved to Kansas City, had a lot less free time, so I only watched about 10-15 movies a year, and I used Netflix rating system to find out what part of those list of 10-15 movies should be, and I thought Netflix did a good job showing me the 10 or so movies that it rated 4.0 or above. When you only watch a few movies a year, you would like to ideally watch the ones that you’ll really like or love, and Netflix did a good job helping me find those. Most movies were rated 2-3 stars, but not all of them. So I ignored the 2-3 star ones and only rented the blu-rays for the ones it thought I would really like.
The other thing about movies and Netflix is that if you want to watch a lot of good movies, you’ll likely end up with the"Netflix Blues" because so many off three good movies are depressing as hell.
I’m glad it worked for you. Do you use any other sites besides Netflix?
I was talking about the days when I had disc Netflix. After I got married I got rid of the discs since I ended up seeing even less movies every year. Ever since I switched to streaming only, I watch even less movies, and haven’t really used the rating system since then. I mostly only watch TV shows now on Netflix, Hulu (once every four months), Sling (for my wife’s Indian channels), and stuff on live TV off the air. Sometimes there’s a month of Crunchyroll thrown in there as well. Only one service at a time, usually, except Netflix, which is constant, and now Sling, which is constant.
I preferred the recommendations when they showed stars (more gredeations between hate and love) AND ALSO INCLUDED THE CRITICAL RATING.
Without the inclusion of critics info & with only up / down votes, I feel like Netflix shows me MUCH more low quality junk and left fielders vs high quality content that I’m likely to enjoy.
But MAYBE THATS THE POINT since Netflix would be happy if I watched piles of cheap to buy or produce junk all day instead of fewer better things.
Netflix is losing high quality 3rd party content because the networks (and Disney) see how much Netflix is raking in and want a bigger piece of the pie. Makes sense that they’d switch over to a fuzzier rating system if there’s less high quality content to peddle.
