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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>"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.
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.
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.