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Netflix Is Ending Reviews July 30th
goombah99 writes: Netflix is sending emails to subscribers announcing the end of user-authored reviews on Netflix. Past reviews are being archived. The stated reason is declining usage. This follows on the previous years' decision to remove range voting for user ratings (0 to 5 stars) and substitute a thumbs up/down approval voting system. One suspects that the former is an unintended consequence of the latter, since the purpose of people who write a review is to try to explain the nuances of their decision. An inexpressive rating system defeats that. It can be argued that approval voting has technical advantages in aggregating ratings for a recommendation engine as it doesn't need to normalize the biases in a rating system between different users and mostly heads off gaming the system with exaggerated degrees of rating. But evidently that was also a necessary component of the review process itself regardless of its utility for recommendation engines. The email that Netflix is sending users is short and to the point: "You contributed a review on Netflix within the last year. We wanted to let you know that this feature will be retired on July 30th due to declining usage. We appreciate you taking time to write a review. All of your reviews will be available at netflix.com/reviews through July 30th."
useless as amazon.com reviews. Thanks for the warning.
Are there any better DVD rental services out there? Netflix's DVD selection has been steadily declining to the point where half of my DVD queue is "unavailable".
I don't respond to AC's.
My first thought was that this is a net loss for Netflix, but in practice the reviews have a disappointingly low signal to noise ratio. So many "Only watched 5 minutes before I turned this garbage off, worst movie ever!" in between the blatant shills calling it some kind of masterpiece and downvoting anyone who dared to point out that it's garbage. There is nothing so bad in the Netflix catalog that its first 10 reviews aren't all 5 stars and talking about how brave the director is for putting up 90 minutes of white noise interspersed with some irrelevant stock footage and how it got a standing ovation at their film festival.
I read the internet for the articles.
This is a company who provided a very useful service one. Had lots of content I was interested in seeing.
Now-day's they self produce stuff I'm mostly not interested in and have removed many things I'd like to watch.
They have basically been ignoring the core of what made them attractive to users like me ( lots of old and some new content cheap). In favor of other business, but I apparently am not a member of the demographic they are marketing too.
So, I dumped them and went on the greener pastures. Lot's of other options out there.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
From the article:
"The stated reason is declining usage. "
Real reason should be:
"The stated reason is declining usage of Netflix due to the crappy Netflix original reviews."
I left two negative reviews that disappeared, none of which had bad words. I subsequently cancelled my Netflix subscription of over 5ish years. Let's face it, Netflix only wants reviews if they are positive. They figure if everyone likes a show new watchers are more likely to watch it and like it to relate to what's popular.
Now instead of everyone deciding for themselves what two or four stars means, people can just decide whether they liked the movie or not. It's simple. I like that.
The next step is some kind of contextual ranking. It could be as simple as "I liked this movie ( ) more than ( ) less than [insert last movie seen here]". Then Netflix could use the Condorcet Method to rank all movies in order from worst to best, and assign each movie a percentile ranking based on its position in the list. Now instead of ranking clustered around the 1-star and 5-star mark, we would see a flat distribution that adds resolution at both poles.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
How about adding a usable UI? I use the streaming website and it's so goddamn slow and bloated. Get rid of all of the Web 2.0 JavaScript bullshit, please! The listing of the shows is awful, too. The title only appears in the show's pictures. It takes way too much effort to find the title text within the image, to ignore any stupud effects and stylings, and to them figure out what the show actually is. All I want is a plain list of links with the show title as the text. There should also be a button to filter out any Bollywood shows. I never want to watch any of that junk.
Netflix changed their UI and reviews have been inaccessible since 2013. ... there was just no way to get to them. The best service Netflix offered was at the end of 2011 and started messing it up since
I believe this is all part of their grand plan to mitigate their large loss of third-party content which started several years ago.
They redesigned their website to be more graphical and less text based several years ago, making it hard to simply sort highly rate titles and scan though them quickly. I thought this was so that the user could not tell how limited their third party movie content was.
Then they introduced their "thumbs up/down" rating system supposedly because their users did not understand how their 5 star rating system was being used differently than the convention that the rest of the world follows. At that time, they also moved the reviews for each show to a separate (last) tab under each show's view.
This latest change completes the transformation. You can now only see what shows Netflix wants you to see unless you do a direct text search. No more sorting and no more reading reviews.
Personally, I am amazed that this is working for them, but I appear to be in the minority. Prior to their website redesign, I was a strong proponent of their service. After the redesign, I was convinced that they would tank and sold my stock in their company. However, their stock price has only gone up from there.
You must have WAY more disposable time than me. I don't mind missing a few good movies that are unpopular if it means I can avoid many movies that are not worth my time.
Why are the reviews for all of the big streaming services, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu so utterly useless? They have no relationship to whether or not I will enjoy something or even whether it's any good or not.
At the same time, with a little bit of judicious discernment, reviews for products on the Amazon site itself, or on Steam, are still very useful (especially when combined with the "questions and answers" on Amazon or the discussion threads on Steam.
They should be able to do better. When Spotify or Pandora make me a daily mix or whatever, they're pretty accurate at predicting what I will like (though not across genres, for some reason). The same should be true for the streaming video services. If Google can predict when I'm going to want a new string-winder for my ukulele, these other big companies should be able to read my goddamn mind too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Going from 5 star review system to like/dislike was percieved by users as bad and they stopped using it. Now you remove user engagement (content reviews) and expect what?
Apart from only few good ones, almost all Netflix originals are so damn boring. There's nothing original about them too. Most are lowly remakes of previously successful films which Netflix turns into its own series, injects with political correctness and destroys in the process.
I have mixed feelings on the idea. On the one hand, the reviews are useful, and many of them provide a basic synopsis and rough idea of whether I might like the film, without having to go to IMDB and look something up. On the other hand, my viewing history and the ratings I have directly given films, are going to be much more relevant to the suggestions they give me.
My wife complains that my suggested watchlist is populated by cheesy low-budget science fiction... This makes sense, because I keep watching that type of content. The vast majority of people would rank these type of films as 1-2 stars out of 5, but that doesn't mean they should simply delete the 1 star content. Those films have enough of an audience to get made, so they need to match movies with their audiences, and ignore if they aren't the critics top choices.
Netflix had entered the big time, landing a special from Amy Schumer that was going to open the door for them to millions more customers, the way Howard Stern did for Sirius. But then...it wasn't very good.
There was their big star - fresh, uncensored, and squeezed into a scandalous leather leather outfit. It was going to be epic! Glitz, glamour, buzz...but then the material was flat. On top of that, she used the special as a platform to demonize gun owners, who never take lightly the suggestion that they surrender their rights, and she was an outspoken supporter of Clinton, who lost the election just days after the release of the special.
There are two types of people in the world: those who don't review Netflix titles, and those who do. Those who do were merciless. In a panic, Netflix broke its otherwise-reliable ratings system, then just left it that way.
If the show had been funny, people would have overlooked the gun rant. Without the gun rant, her performance and the leather probably would have been enough. As it wound up, it just didn't work. But I still like Amy, leather, and guns.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
>"Now instead of everyone deciding for themselves what two or four stars means, people can just decide whether they liked the movie or not. It's simple. I like that."
I *hate* it. Because there are lots of movies I neither like nor despise... and there are movies I like and movies I really, really like. None of that can be expressed with a "like/hate" or "good/bad" 2-point scale. Plus, somehow, Netflix LEARNED what I liked based on realistic ratings (I rate EVERYTHING I watch). Now how are they going to do that? I will have no scale to know how certain they are I will "like" it or "dislike" it.
How hard is it to rate on a 5 point scale? We do it zillions of times a day at nearly every school in the nation...
5 = A = very best = Absolutely love
4 = B = good = Like it
3 = C = average = OK/Meh/mediocre
2 = D = not good = disliked it more than liked it
1 = F = worst/fail = hated it
Now, if it were a 7, 9, or 13 point scale, I can see why it might be more difficult than it is worth, overall. But really, a 5 point scale is the one that most everyone has used for many years throughout a significant part of their lives. Even if the definition of each rating slid a little here and there, it isn't so varying as to be useless.
Getting rid of reviews is yet another hostile move to the way many of us use Netflix to try and decide what to watch and help others.
"It was cool when you were rating other people's stuff. But now that we're making our own content, we really don't appreciate you saying it's all junk."
On an even more cynical level, they simply want to control what you watch.
So many companies want to stream their own content that it is balkanizing the industry. Kind of like everyone in open source wanting their own version. So now we'll have so many providers that people won't know what to pick, or it'll end up costing more than cable. And then, who knows? Maybe all of them lose. Or maybe people are so stupid that they fall for the model.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Netflix was popularized on their ability to innovate and deliver a targeted experience. It was so important to them that they used to sponsor a million dollar prize to anyone who could improve upon their ability to match content to users.
Two things happened simultaneously that changed this:
1) They started making their own content; some of which is good but most of which is shit.
and
2) They started losing good content from 3rd parties, leaving them with mostly shit.
A good, balanced ratings system doesn't exactly work in an environment where you have very little of value to offer and you want to prioritize your own garbage besides. Netflix has had to absolutely gut and now flush one of the core innovations that built them into the juggernaut they are today; they are fast becoming just another new media studio. HBO is their competitor now. I yearn for the Netflix catalog of yore.
Problem is I'm not sure who fucked up here.
Netflix changed the rating system such that it became impossible to identify good movies anymore or read how others rated a movie. This pushed me to Amazon Prime. For a subscriber who did not watch a single movie in Amazon Prime ever now I am a regular and I subscribe to HBO as well. Hope I am the outlier for Netflix.
I watch stuff on Netflix. A lot. It's easily my biggest bandwidth hog. But my problem is that I don't watch that many new things simply because it's only gotten more and more difficult to find things I know I want to watch. That doesn't mean there's less content that I would likely enjoy. I mean that compared to when Netflix started its streaming service, it's only gotten consistently more difficult to search for films and series based on my self-determined tastes.
You used to be able to search by language, sub/dub, year made, genre, sub-genre, star-rating, and a few other things. If nothing came up, then you'd adjust your parameters.
Today, you can search by... title? You can still search by genre, but they made it more difficult than it used to be (or needs to be).
It's as if maybe... just maybe... they would rather market or steer you toward specific products... products they may have made certain guarantees that X number of people would watch and thus Y amount of guaranteed revenue could be paid to license-holders.
- Auto-playing trailers (no way to disable them)
- Where did star ratings go? (can only use them on the DVD site)
- Too much garbage content (I have never watched an Indian movie, yet they keep appearing on my recommendations)
- Declining DVD selection (and what's up with scratched/broken discs and no replacements available?)
I've been a customer for a long time, but Netflix keeps making decisions that will ultimately lead to me cancelling my subscription.
Let's say you watched two movies in a row and you really liked both a lot. Under a 5-star system you would rate them both a "5", which means you cannot express through the rating which one you liked more. But instead of a 5-star rating, if you were asked to choose whether you liked the second one more (thumbs up) or less (thumbs down) than the first movie, you could provide that missing information.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I actually like a lot of movies and shows that aren't very popular, or weren't popular when first run. If we only ever watched popular stuff there'd never be a market for indie films and there'd be no such thing as "cult favorites". If you go by popularity, then McDonald's is the best restaurant in the world. A good review is supposed to help you find something you like.
This is typical of leftist websites who can't control speech so they simply ban it.
And then you're limiting the rating's potential usefulness to people who have watched one of the two movies already, and is deciding whether to watch the second... Ratings should be about helping other people decide what to watch. I'd favor a version of the 5-star system that only includes an opt-in 2 degrees of separation system. Only include the number ratings from people who you know, by authorizing friend requests or some such, and the people they know.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
5 = almost perfect / one of the best movies of all time
4 = "really liked" / would recommend / definitely plan to watch it again
3 = "liked" / ok / might watch again
2 = disliked / don't want to see it again
1 = hated / would badmouth
And after 10+ years, I'm ending my Netflix subscription. This review thing is just the kicker. Netflix has annoyed me with their UI changes on top of less and less content. And the content that is left will be harder to tell the good stuff, from the okay stuff, from the mild crap, to the total crap. And with the Obama programming on the way, it will skew toward the total crap.
Reviews about SJW content?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Ever since NetFlix decided to put a thumbs-up/thumb-down rating system on top of their own 1-5 stars system, the reviews have been buried.
You have to really fuss with the site to get at the reviews and still lingering 1-5 star system buried beneath the forward facing thumb-up/down.
So yeah, nothing really is changing except instead of hard to find the reviews, they'll be harder to find and no longer added to.
Which is fine really, most people I think consult other review sites (Rotten Tomatoes?) rather than NetFlix anyway.
About my only complaint really is the 1-5 star system being buried (is it retiring too?), cuz it seemed like before they put up the thumbs-up/down system, it'd make better recommendations when you could rate stuff 1-5 stars. The new 'percentage rating' based on your prior thumb-up/down ratings, related to unseen shows and films seems cryptic and hard to understand what is generating that percentage. It's entirely possible this is all subjective, that I might have felt I was better impacting the suggestions when I could rate something with 5 different levels, instead of just yes or no.
>"Let's say you watched two movies in a row and you really liked both a lot. Under a 5-star system you would rate them both a "5", which means you cannot express through the rating which one you liked more."
But nobody has watched only two movies before. Most people will think about all the hundreds or even thousands of movies they have seen and try to rate it based on that knowledge. In your example, I would rate both based on what I have SEEN before, not just those two in isolation or against only each other in some endless 2-by-2 comparison.
I rarely rate a movie a 5 stars. To me, those are the best of the best (ones I will likely want to watch several times over again in the coming years). I started keeping my own spreadsheet years ago, afraid sites like Netflix would do EXACTLY what they are doing now (destroying ratings). It is certainly not complete (because I have seen a LOT more), but I have my ratings for 981 movies on a 5 point scale. Keep in mind, I usually only watch/buy/rent movies I think I will like (based on genre, Netflix scores, reviews, etc).... but my average is still 3.53 stars across those. Here is my distribution (rounded to whole stars, because sometimes I even use fractions) :
5's 64
4's 452
3's 417
2's 41
1's 5
Again, if you had me rate movies chosen for me at random, without knowing anything about me, there would be a LOT more 1's and 2's, and significantly more 3's. Had I been forced to use only a "like/dislike" scale, then my 3's ratings mean nothing, which is a HUGE number of my ratings. And the precious 5's would just get mixed in with the 4's... destroying a huge amount of useful information.
Their review page now displays just a star number instead of a graphical representation of the rating, and it's now harder to see the well-written critical reviews. My guess is that they were paid to do so, which is in line with the increasing reliance on formulaic, nearly unwatchable crap that's being pushed out by hollywood today.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
If Bob likes movie "A" more than "B" and Susan likes "B" more than "C", then Condorcet would rank them like this: A > B > C
This can expand to any number of movies. Then someone only has to find a movie in the list that they're thinking about watching and another that they've already watched (perhaps one in the same genre) and look at their relative placements in the list (their percent rankings) to see which one people think is better. In that way it works the same as the 5-star rating system but now when you're voting you don't need to spend time deciding whether it's a 3- or 4-star movie while trying to be consistent with the way you've voted on other movies in the past. Too much effort!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
From the invention of movies through the 1940's Hollywood operated on the "Studio System". Under this system the studios which made the movies and the theaters which showed the movies were owned by the same corporations. Thus the studios were guarantied distribution of their movies; but movie goers could only see the movies of the studios that had theaters in their area; and independent theaters and studios were out of luck.
In the '50s Congress decided these monopolies were bad and forced the corporations to divest either their studios or their theaters creating a situation where each theater could present the best movies created from the whole host of studios.
Today ISPs (the modern theaters) are buying up the studios effectively reconstituting the monopolies of old. This is an anti-consumer action. Independent creators will largely be locked out. Each of the corporations will eventually insist that customers must use their service to access their content.
The only way to stop this is government regulation; hence we need an act of congress.
How hard is it to rate on a 5 point scale? We do it zillions of times a day at nearly every school in the nation...
5 = A = very best = Absolutely love
1 = F = worst/fail = hated it
Apparently it's hard. Let me direct your attention to this partial article: You Graduated Cum Laude? So Did Everyone Else. At X and Y, more got the designations than didn't.
So just save time and space and make everything a 10 or 11 and be done with it.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
They're removing it because it's going to be Obama's platform and they know what kind of reviews he will receive.
Yes, this is the truth.
Just like opening-weekend embargoes, they don't want word getting out how crap the content is before suckers buy it.
I've been on Netflix for a few months and never imagined they have a review system.
5 = almost perfect / one of the best movies of all time / give me more like this / would not watch again
4 = liked / would recommend / give me more like this / would not watch again
3 = passed the time / don't care/ would not watch again
2 = disliked / give me less like this / would not watch again
1 = hated / never give me crap like this / would not watch again
How hard is it to rate on a 5 point scale?
Incredibly. Just becaues you found a logical example of how it works doesn't mean anyone actually does it like that. There's been many studies into biases and tendencies in reviewing systems, how they relate to psychology, how they relate to the reviewer's gender, how they relate to the impact of what they are reviewing.
Let's talk about 5 point scales:
Mobile apps:
5 = It works.
4 = It works but I want a feature it doesn't have.
3 = I clicked by accident.
2 = I clicked by accident.
1 = Anything from it formatted the phone and sent my dickpicks to my grandma, to there was a misspelling in the man page, to I don't like the colour of the okay button.
Service Staff:
5 = Did their job
4 = Should be fired.
3 = Should be fired.
2 = Should be fired.
1 = You guys are idiots why did you ever hire a person like this in the first place.
On a 5 point scale in many review systems the defaults tend to the extremes with any deviation from the default moving to the other extreme. People in general don't cope with a 5 point or even a 3 point scale. It is an incredibly useless way of getting generic feedback without moderating that feedback with additional data.
Perhaps all they need to do is offer a better definition of the scale to those rating it...
It doesn't change human nature. Even when the definitions are given studies have shown that there will be inherent bias in the results for all sorts of reasons unrelated to the content.
E.g. service staff example (just one example of bias): You can give the scale. You can follow it religiously and without empathy. The next person will come along and think, "Yes the service was horrible but I don't want the poor guy to lose his job, I'll give him a 5".
That's the kind of thinking that goes on both conciously and subconciously in everyone's head when they fill out multipoint scale. Except for robots, robots feel nothing, which is a problem in itself when you expect a lot of emapthetic humans to fill out a result and suddenly someone sticks to the defined scale, THEY become the bias in your otherwise corrected results.
I end up not giving most movies a thumbs up or thumbs down, whereas I would have given them a 3 in the past.
If you have an old device that hasn't been given a modern Netflix interface, their star rating system is still alive and kicking.
Judging by how many people give five star reviews to mediocrity, it is apparently pretty hard. Ideally one would only give five stars to a handful of best-liked things, instead people work on the "default 5 stars" model unless it really sucked.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Super interesting and great, fuck reviews lets make money
this feature will be retired on July 30th due to declining usage
It's declining in usage because you're hiding reviews and making them hard to find!
You're making them hard to find because the tendency of people to bitch rather than praise makes people not watch many offerings, your internal numbers show.
This hurts subscription maintenance as people feel they are getting less out of it once they've watched the good stuff.
Ergo reviews have to go.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Let's say you watched two movies in a row and you really liked both a lot. Under a 5-star system you would rate them both a "5", which means you cannot express through the rating which one you liked more. But instead of a 5-star rating, if you were asked to choose whether you liked the second one more (thumbs up) or less (thumbs down) than the first movie, you could provide that missing information.
This only works if the two movies you saw in a row where in the same genre (and other factors - for example some movies are more fun watching with a crowd.)
How could I honestly compare a gritty depressing drama or action comedy?
Ever tried to get REAL tech support out of them? You can't find it
But if that kind of extreme bias is the problem, then a two-point scale of "like" and "dislike" is just as useless. It would better to find a way to filter out useless ratings or a reasonable scale (like 5 points)... not so hard for Netflix, for example, since they are known/logged in people. If their ratings are nothing but 1 and 5, or unrealistically positive or negative, or never enough ratings, then limit the usefulness of their ratings when applied to other people (the group value). For the customer's OWN use, they still might have some value, however.
Agreed. And in those cases, it should be pretty easy for an algorithm to spot the useless nature or trend of that person's ratings and prevent those from contaminating the overall rating (at least in cases like Netflix, where the rater is known and has a history).
Bill Burr on the Netflix rating system https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I am very unhappy with this Netflix decision. I rely on the reviews to let me know if I want to spend my time watching a particular movie. I also look at the reviews after I watch a movie to see if people felt the same way I did about a movie and explain certain aspects that I donâ(TM)t understand.
If Bob likes movie "A" more than "B" and Susan likes "B" more than "C", then Condorcet would rank them like this: A > B > C
If you think movie quality is one dimensional, you have never understood any movie in your life.
deciding whether it's a 3- or 4-star movie while trying to be consistent with the way you've voted on other movies in the past. Too much effort!
If, for a long time, bad movies of a particular genre X were being made available - there might be many consistent watchers of that genre that would very likely rate a following mediocre movie highly. Since they are consistent watchers of the genre X - they are likely to have rated movies of genre Y with thumbs down. Now if a multi-genre viewer sees the rating created in such an environment - he would very likely see the mediocre movie as an extremely highly rated movie. Even though, from just a few months ago, there is another movie of the genre X that was better liked by most people. This wouldn't happen in 1-5 rating - there is no problem rating a movie as 3 after a series of 1 or 2 rated movies of the same genre. So the multi-genre viewer would easily find the earlier 4 or 5 rated movie.
Additionally, if you watch movies from various sources - you might not even remember which movie last you watched on Netflix. Even on Netflix, maybe you watched with a friend with his account and you influenced the rating decision in the ensuing discussion. While not knowing the details of the previous movie that was watched on that Netflix account. If the movie is rated after the ensuing discussion when the account owner is alone with the Netflix account to rate the movie - the finer points and details of the emotions that were experienced at the time might be lost resulting in a wrong rating.
If Netflix reminds you which movie you last watched and how you rated it - you might forget the details of which movie was watched *before* that one, why you rated such a stupid movie with thumbs up. Actually maybe the last-to-last movie you watched was even worse - but you don't remember the details.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
But if that kind of extreme bias is the problem, then a two-point scale of "like" and "dislike" is just as useless.
Not at all. It's a completely different kind of useless. That's the problem with survey based studies. They are all flawed in different ways. The yes / no system resolves a whole series of flaws and biases while introducing a whole different set.
Anything remotely science based, majority of reviews are Jesus freaks talking shit about their favourite fairy stories. A bit like slashdot when it comes to real science, for example.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The REAL reason is that so much of recent movies are crap that they need to hide this from potential consumers.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
that after the star review debacle with Amy Schumer, they are concerned about reviews to come when they switch from Netflix to ObamaTV.