re: Netflix's New Rating System SUCKS!

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I'm amazed that anyone gives a frick about Netflix's rating system.

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My main gripe is that they couldn't be honest with something as basic as a ***** rating system. They waited until they were ditching it to say, "By the way, those stars never meant what they mean on every other film site. That wasn't our users rating our films, that was us telling you what we thought you'd like." Why not just tell your users what you're doing so that they can use it as a tool?

Star system is good for your own stuff, but when those ratings are aggregated and used across the service it falls flat.

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I give this change a thumbs-up. Everyone knows what “like” and “dislike” mean. People have very different opinions on 1-5 star ratings.

(A “meh” — neither like nor dislike, would be good too.)

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I got a lot of pushback from readers regarding my post yesterday supporting Netflix’s switch from a 5-star rating system to a simple thumbs up/down system. The gist of the complaints is that some people do carefully consider their star ratings, and do value the granularity of being able to say that you like/dislike something a little or a lot. But of course some people take that care. The problem is that most people don’t, and collectively, 5-star rating systems are garbage.

This post from YouTube back in 2009 shows it with data: when they had a 5-star rating system, the overwhelmingly most common rating was 5-stars. The next most common was the lowest, 1-star. 2-, 3-, and 4-star ratings were effectively never used.

For a personally curated collection, 5-star ratings can be meaningful. But for a recommendation service that averages ratings among all users, they are not. It’s the difference between designing for the ideal case of how people should behave versus designing for the practical case of how people actually behave.

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RT must have a contract with someone else that prevents this or something.

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Netflix can't manipulate RT. Netflix's rating system has to be integrated with their suggestion system, they can't do that with RT.

Plus, RT is everywhere already. I can't pull up a movie on my cable box without the RT score showing up.

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UNLESS, Netflix manipulates the scores on their original content to make them seem better so more people watch them. But in that case, I guess they could just remove the RT score from those.

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I don't know about inflating on their content, but they're manipulating ratings in the hopes of you watching more content overall. An RT score would conflict with the intent of their rating system. They'd be showing you a thumbs up and a splat, and you wouldn't know what to think. (Unless you knew exactly how both rating systems work... Then you'd know that they're telling you, "Most critics would recommend that you NOT see this movie, but it appears that you like shitty movies, so you decide.")