Slashdot Mirror
Why You Should Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings (fivethirtyeight.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Statistical news blog fivethirtyeight.com noticed some odd discrepancies in online movie ratings, which caused them to do some investigating. They found it was generally a bad idea to rely on such ratings, particularly from sites like Fandango. "When I focused on movies that had 308 or more user reviews, none of the 209 films had below a 3-star rating. Seventy-eight percent had a rating of 4 stars or higher." Further, "In a normal rounding system, a site would round to the nearest half-star — up or down. In the case of Ted 2 [which was displaying 4.5 stars], then, we'd expect the rating to be rounded down to 4 stars. But Fandango rounded the 'ratingValue' [4.1] up. I pulled the number of stars listed on the page of each film in our sample of 437 (with at least one user review), as well as the ratingValue listed on the page's source. And I found that Fandango doesn't round a rating down when we'd mathematically expect that ... Fandango.com's rounding methodology, even if it was just an innocent bug, is a good example of why you should be skeptical of online movie ratings, especially from companies selling you tickets."
You mean people on the intertubes selling us stuff might not be honest about the reviews of the stuff they're selling us?
IMDB, sure, I mostly trust them. Because a LOT of people review things on IMDB. Rotten tomatoes is an aggregator which includes a lot of sources. I mostly trust them to be independent and coming from real sources.
But, really, ANY review site directly owned by a company trying to sell you stuff should probably a) be required to state their affiliation, and b) assumed to be engaging in a little corporate driven puffery.
From the sounds of it, fandango (which I am admittedly not familiar with) is either more likely to give good reviews, or is deliberately skewing to better reviews to sell product.
Are they uniformly rating all movies better (in which case they're just generally bad at reviews or too easily pleased), or if movies from specific studios get pushed up (in which case it's probably getting into a grey area).
The problem with content on the internet is knowing who paid for it, and what other affiliations they have.
Don't most video game sites also just give overly good reviews, often based on a product they've barely seen or have been prohibited from giving bad reviews?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This is why I always read a sampling of the actual reviews, rather than going purely off ratings. We all have different tastes. Sometimes the things a reviewer points out about a movie as why they hate it are the very things I enjoy.
Well, since you've asked: Never. We do generally take offense to really stupid comments made by unfunny asshats though. Keep it up, son. Your dad must be very proud.
In all fairness I'd have to say that the vast majority of LGBT people I know are cool and don't freak out over silly stuff like this.
A lot of SJWs, however, would likely see this as an "discriminatory issue" and they'll be the ones to suddenly make it a "problem that must be dealt with".
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The reason I don't trust online movie ratings is because Dr. Who is popular. And Dr. Who is not something I can tolerate. In short, a large part of the populace's taste is not my taste, so those stars... meaningless to me.
And sure enough, there are movies I loved that got poor ratings, and movies I thought were utter tripe that got high rankings.
Same thing goes for Silkel and Ebert and that class of professional opinionators. Their taste is not my taste. So they can't be trusted by me.
With this in mind, a site's questionable rounding of 4.1 to 4.5... not even on the radar.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.