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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."
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.
I had a book published by Addison-Wesley that was pretty terrible, and they hired people to make positive reviews on amazon.com for it. Also, they asked me and my co-author to get our families and friends to do the same. I've ignored reviews on Amazon since then. Maybe I'm being too hard on myself since my book was the first one on that particular Agile topic so maybe it was better than nothing, but in retrospect, it isn't a very good book.
>"Personally, I am amazed that this is working for them, but I appear to be in the minority"
+1 to your post and add me to your "minority." I saw all the changes you listed and thought exactly the same things. At least on the DVD site I had some control, on the streaming site, it is a wasteland of annoying scroll bars that tell me almost nothing about what I might want to watch or what is available. No real sorting, no real consideration about my ratings or those of others, no way to really see what is ACTUALLY new. It is beyond frustrating.
I, too, am convinced they are doing all this to:
1) Hide or remove tools from users to keep them "engaged"
2) Make it look like they have more content than they do
3) "Guide" people into accepting what they do have
4) Censor feedback that might lower watching what they do have