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Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down (variety.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: Get ready to say goodbye to star ratings on Netflix: The company is getting ready to replace stars with Pandora-like thumbs ups and thumbs downs in the coming weeks. Previously-given star rating will still be used to personalize the profiles of Netflix users, but the stars are disappearing from the interface altogether. Netflix VP of Product Todd Yellin told journalists on Thursday during a press briefing at the company's headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif., that the company had tested the new thumbs up and down ratings with hundred of thousands of members in 2016. "We are addicted to the methodology of A/B testing," Yellin said. The result was that thumbs got 200% more ratings than the traditional star-rating feature. Netflix is also introducing a new percent-match feature that shows how good of a match any given show or movie is for an individual subscriber. For example, a show that should close to perfectly fit a user's taste may get a 98% match. Shows that have less than a 50% match won't display a match-rating, however.
Netflix will control the narrative, with minimal input from pesky users. How long before there's only a heart symbol? How long before they take away comments like IMDB because you don't want them.
Great. Now the PC world has invaded online movie reviews. Sorry, haven't seen Lena Dunham or Amy Shumer, mostly because I dislike their material. Maybe it's a generational thing. Netflix is now invalidating their recommendations because some whiny Hollywood types got their feelings hurt. Has anyone ever seen Heaven's Gate? Seriously, if Netflix can't stand the heat of their ratings system, why even have a ratings system? Is Reed Hastings (Co-founder and CEO) so needy for West Coast adulation that he's gutting their system? Sad.
Could be. I'm playing a game I got on Steam right now. It is thoroughly mediocre. I want to rate it, but Steam has only a positive/negative system as well, and this game deserves neither. So which do I give it? If I round up, it makes the game look better than it is. If I round down, I am being giving an inaccurate portray of how I really feel. I either am inaccurate, or I make tht game look better than it actually is in the rating aggregate, which will increase the likelihood of Steam making a sale.
In Netflix's case though, seeing as how you've already bought the subscription, I don't see how this will help them, but maybe that is their angle. Either way, as someone who gives far more 2-4 stars for things than 1 and 5 stars (because most things tend to fll somewhere between total crap and absolutely amazing), I do not welcome this change.
Strangely this change is suddenly coming after Amy Schumer's latest comedy flop. And the claims of "review bombing" of course, every person that I've heard talk about watching it said it was a steaming pile of shit and worthy of it's 1 star review. A few people I know said it was so bad they wished they could have gotten back those precious minutes of their life.
Om, nomnomnom...
If they're going to convert my 2000+ ratings to thumbs up / thumbs down, then they better choose 4 as the cutoff for thumbs up.
5 = great ("top 100 of all time; would recommend to everyone")
4 = very good ("thumbs up / would recommend to other people, but only if I know their taste in movies")
3 = okay ("I've seen it / it's not good enough to recommend, but not bad enough to badmouth")
2 = bad ("thumbs down / would badmouth to anyone that asks")
1 = awful ("one of the worst things I've ever watched / never watch another movie from this director again")
I've only rated close to 100 titles each as 1 and 5, and about 300 - 400 titles each as 2 and 4. All the rest (i.e. the majority) are 3's.
tl;dr: For me, a rating of 4+ means "would be willing to watch it again."
What's next -- removing the thumbs down???
What the fuck is the point of having ratings if you are just going to make them homogeneous???
Just because _you,_ Netflix, don't let me rate a movie 0/5 doesn't mean it deserves a 1/5. IF I hate a movie it should get 0/5.
The WHOLE point of a 5 star rating is to provide fine-grained-ratings not some bullshit dual artificial rating. There is a HUGE difference between me liking a movie 50% and 100%. Some movies are 3/5 (60%), 4/5 (80%), and very few are 5/5 (100%). Lumping them these ALL together is fucking retarded. HOW is that helping the system find stuff I _really_ like vs stuff I _kind of_ like???
Should be very easy for you and netflix to prove then. After all, youtube does this already. You have to watch(aka play) a percentage of the video in a steady stream for your up/downvote to be counted outside of what's actually displayed. The fact that netflix isn't showing this to be the case, and that the media has simply run with the "review bombing" and giving Schumer a platform to cry over while screaming "harassment/sexism/alt-right/etc" says that it's not a case of that. But people believe that it was simply terrible and were more vocal than normal, especially how much she and netflix tried to hype it up.
This isn't any different then the ghostbusters trailer flop, followed by the movie flop. She along with the other actors and director then went flailing their arms screaming "sexism/misogyny/etc" and the media started falling all over itself promoting that narrative. Despite the fact that it was simply a shit movie, the trailer was shit as well, and people in general hated it.
Om, nomnomnom...