Netflix Deletes All User Reviews (engadget.com)

Netflix has removed all user reviews from its site, just like they said they would in early July. Here's what Netflix now has to say about posting reviews on its site: "Netflix customers were able to leave reviews on Netflix.com until mid-2018, when reviews were removed due to declining use. To learn how Netflix suggests TV shows and movies we think you'll love, visit our Ratings & Recommendations article." Engadget reports: Netflix probably had reasons other than the section's decline in use, as well. For instance, it had to deal with issues like "review bombing" by trolls hoping to bring down a show's rating back when it used stars instead of the thumbs up-down system. Netflix might have decided that reviews don't lead to enough views to warrant spending resources on policing them. It has a "percentage match" system that suggests titles based on previous ones you've watched, after all, so there's probably very little incentive for the platform to keep the reviews section running.

Comments

Trolling

[AmiMoJo]

It's probably due to trolling. IMDB is the same, certain movies are heavily trolled, e.g. Black Panther.

Re:Trolling

[TigerPlish]

It's probably due to trolling. IMDB is the same, certain movies are heavily trolled, e.g. Black Panther.

It's the same everywhere, just about. For a good decade now, if not more, I've felt forums and comments are nothing but a wasteland.. why I waste my time in /. I'll never know.. but I do know this: I've quit reading and posting in *all* the forums of things I like / liked. /. is the last one I've not retreated from.

Re:Trolling

[shmlco]

I hear that /. is going to remove user comments soon....

Re:Trolling

[vadim_t]

It would not be trolled that heavily if the media is not that hell-bent on forcing a "cartoon" into a social commentary.

Uh, what are you on? Comics were always heavy on social commentary. X-Men are social commentary with its mutants vs non-mutants dynamics. Frank Miller does a crapload of social commentary in his comics (often awful). Iron Man is social commentary, it was created by Stan Lee to see if he could make a selfish, drunk, industrialist weapons manufacturer, "shove him down people's throats" (Stan Lee quote), and make them like him. This was in the 60s, at the height of the anti-war sentiment. Captain America is social commentary. It goes on, and on, and on.

Black Panther being social commentary is nothing new, and hails straight from the source material.

Re:Trolling

[The Rizz]

I hear that /. is going to remove user comments soon....

At which point, will it have any real reason to exist?

Re:Trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear that /. is going to remove user comments soon....

At which point, will it have any real reason to exist?

slash-woosh!

Re: Trolling

[_Sharp'r_]

Blacks in the U.S. had a much lower rate of fatherless homes and crime before the "War on Poverty" started in 1964 and the government took over as the "Dad" in families, incentivizing single motherhood. In 1950, the single motherhood rate for blacks was under 20%. Now it's over 70%.

When you pay trillions of dollars per year for something over decades, you shouldn't be surprised when you end up with more of it.

Re:Trolling

[slashmaddy]

At that point, with noting left to read, I wonder if /. readers will start reading TFS, or worse, TFA (shiver me timbers!)...

Re: Trolling

[pots]

The other person isn't explaining things well, but the problem with your argument is that you're taking two events, seeing correlation between those events, and assuming that the two events are related. This is not a safe assumption, no matter how much sense you might think it makes.

For example, the article that you linked gives another possibility: "we should give less-educated women more reasons — like educational and career opportunity — to postpone motherhood." In other words, this is a suggestion that the increase in single motherhood could stem from an decline in future prospects for poor women. Something which has presumably declined disproportionately for black women over that time period. (I don't know that this is true, but the argument depends on it.)

because now they are the target of the reviews

[nazsco]

before they had tons of dvds, they needed reviews to predict which ones to stock up.

now they control production and presentation. they will tell you what to watch and when. and you will watch and like it.

Re: because now they are the target of the reviews

[nazsco]

but yeah, people will also eat up the PR spin that it was because of trolls or, gasp, GDPR.

Re:because now they are the target of the reviews

[omnichad]

They haven't? It doesn't show in most UIs anymore. I can only give a thumbs up or down rating.

Re:because now they are the target of the reviews

[rh2600]

The cynicism is strong with this one.

When they had DVDs they had to keep physical inventory, and ship physical inventory, so predicting demand was important to their logistics planning.

Now they have unlimited inventory, and shipping is essentially instant and with zero marginal cost - so in that regard, demand prediction is less important.

Re: because now they are the target of the reviews

[backslashdot]

âoeWagnerâ(TM)s music is a lot better than it sounds.â -Edgar Wilson Nye, 1898

âoeThe movie is more entertaining than youâ(TM)ll feel.â -Netflix, 2018

Re:because now they are the target of the reviews

[omnichad]

Might be a nice perk of not getting updates. If you're lucky you don't get loud autoplaying videos for each movie/series while browsing either.

Re: because now they are the target of the reviews

[Shotgun]

And they do a crap job of that. Without previews, the only way to know what a show will be like is to check it out. Get 5 minutes in, see that it is crap because the stand up comedian thinks we should all laugh at "Trump Stoopid", and bail on it. Now it counts as "viewed" and they ask if you want to see more like it.

I canceled my membership.

I miss the stars

[bobstreo]

Turd up or Turd down isn't really of any use to me.

If it's Turds down, I'll probably never bother even putting it in my queue.

Their recommendation system is at best, horribly broken. Anything below 92% appears to be just a wild guess at best, and a feeble attempt to draw traffic to something I have no interest in.

There are many other different web resources to scour Netflix for things worth watching, I use instantwatcher.com
http://instantwatcher.com/

Sure, blame the trolls

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm sure it has nothing to to with the fact that they had trouble gaming the "best guess for you" ratings on their self-produced content.

Netflix's suggested ratings used to work extremely well, back when they were only offering third-party content - I could pretty much count on my opinion matching pretty closely with their algorithm's prediction. But then they started producing their own stuff, and amazingly it always was displayed as between 4.7 and 5 stars as their "best guess" for me - so I'd watch it, expecting something great, but most of the time the content was mediocre at best, so my actual rating would end up being 2-3 stars.

I suspect they got rid of the star rankings because of their own show's relatively bad real-world performance - but that still left the problem of less-than-glowing written reviews. So the final solution was to get rid of those as well.

Sad for me...

[EdZep]

Definitely a loss of functionality. I read the reviews a lot, when shopping titles outside my usual fare; shopping a new genre; trying to decide whether to take a chance on an obscure title, or some B movie I'd caught wind of.

Here is your answer

[Ol Olsoc]

Mindy Kaling, on negative reviews of all female Ocean's 11: "If I had to base my career on what white men wanted I would be very unsuccessful,” said Kaling in an interview with Yahoo.

“And the thing about so much of what this movie is, I think white men, critics would enjoy it, would enjoy my work, but often I think there is a critic who will damn it in a way because they don’t understand it, because they come at it at a different point of view, and they’re so powerful, Rotten Tomatoes.”

Brie Larson adds:

“What I am saying is if you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will have a chance to see your movie, and review your movie.”

Larson informs us that more than 63 percent of reviewers are white and male. (Almost the same percentage of women to men in university), and only 18 percent are both white and female

Only 4.1 percent are female and from underrepresented groups

“I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about ‘A Wrinkle in Time,'” Larson added. “It wasn’t made for him. I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.”

Now to my thoughts There are the reasons that quasi-official sites like Netflix are removing reviews. This is a pretty big problem, and the movie industry needs positive reviews, and the trend in movies is proving a to be a little problem. The people who make such blatantly sexist movies must hear that they are good, and if people do notlike them, they must have a a target of blame. To them, The all female Ghostbusters did not fail because it wasn't funny and because it was sexist in nature, It failed because of thos fucking teenage boys. As Kaling decrees. https://www.indiewire.com/2016...!

What is amazing is that ability to scream about racism and sexism, and simultaneous replace it with sexism and racism so blatant and in your face that you can proclaim people pointing out the problem with your work is somehow racist and sexist. The worm ouroboros as it were.

But anyhow, there is the problem - White males.

Re:Here is your answer

[AmiMoJo]

Making a movie for women isn't sexist. It doesn't hurt men.

And the problem isn't white males. You even quoted the damn explanation of the problem but somehow saw the phrase "white male" and had some kind of Pavlovian response.

The problem is movies being reviewed almost exclusively by people who are not the target audience and who don't understand them.

Geeks should understand this very well. How often do critics slate great sci-fi movies that we love and which become cult classics? The views of sci-fi fan critics get buried by the ones who thought LaLa Land was better.

Re:Here is your answer

[ooloorie]

Mindy Kaling, on negative reviews of all female Ocean's 11: "If I had to base my career on what white men wanted I would be very unsuccessful,” said Kaling in an interview with Yahoo. Larson informs us that more than 63 percent of reviewers are white and male.

Yeah, and for a film like Ocean 11, that's probably the usual target demographic, and that demographic doesn't like having political ideology shoved down their throats when going to a movie, nor do they identify with an all female cast.

“I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about ‘A Wrinkle in Time,'” Larson added. “It wasn’t made for him. I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.”

I suspect the average struggling 40-year-old white dude knows a lot more about hardship than a lily-white, ultra-privileged, ultra-wealthy, ultra-bigoted actress like Brie Larson.

But anyhow, there is the problem - White males.

Well, it's a problem you have to learn to live with because we aren't going away and we're not going to change. Sorry.

Re:Here is your answer

[ooloorie]

Making a movie for women isn't sexist. It doesn't hurt men. The problem is movies being reviewed almost exclusively by people who are not the target audience and who don't understand them.

The people making these movies deliberately took movies targeted at male audiences and then put in an all-female cast. I think it's not surprising that "the wrong" audience watches them and then gives them a low rating.

Furthermore, not being in the target audience doesn't mean that people have nothing to say about it. The Birth of a Nation was targeted at (and a favorite of) white males like Woodrow Wilson, but African Americans certainly had every right to comment on it and criticize it.

Re:Here is your answer

[Ol Olsoc]

The people making these movies deliberately took movies targeted at male audiences and then put in an all-female cast. I think it's not surprising that "the wrong" audience watches them and then gives them a low rating.

And let us not forget that Ghostbusters was target at children.

Furthermore, not being in the target audience doesn't mean that people have nothing to say about it. The Birth of a Nation was targeted at (and a favorite of) white males like Woodrow Wilson, but African Americans certainly had every right to comment on it and criticize it.

The concept of males "not understanding" is yet another sexist idea that some women have, an extension of yet one more of their stereotypes. I watched "Steel Magnolias" a movie obviously made for women, and I "got it". I had no problem with it. Wasn't ordinarily my type of movie, but I didn't get bored and stop.

And the biggest aspect of the movie was that there was no jarring content - the reason that the movie was overwhelmingly female starred fir right in.

I howled at "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" Another "chick flick" that ended up crossing over to allowing everyone to enjoy it - it made good sense.

These are good stories, shot and edited well.Touching and both touching and funny. I suppose some of our more radical posters would see some sort of Patriarchal contamination in me just mentioning 2 movies about wome getting married, but that's their problem - I only mention those because they were fine movies.

Re:Here is your answer

[AmiMoJo]

And let us not forget that Ghostbusters was target at children.

Not really. Most of the jokes would have gone over the heads of kids. Like the original it was aimed at adults, with adult humour.

The concept of males "not understanding" is yet another sexist idea that some women have

It's not a question of "not understanding", it's a question of being the target audience and having experiences that make the movie relevant to you.

I'm a bit old for Disney movies these days. I do have a certain appreciation for the old Transformers animated movie though, because it was a part of my childhood. It's not that I don't understand Disney movies, or even don't enjoy them on a certain level, but I'm probably not the guy you want to ask for advice on if they are good or not. I don't really know if you kid will like them, because I don't have any experience of being a kid in 2018.

Of course it's not impossible for white male critics to understand these movies or even do excellent reviews of them, but if we go back to reality for a moment we find that in practice this tends not to happen. So asking for more reviews by people who are the target audience seems entirely reasonable.

Re:Here is your answer

[strikethree]

I read the book, A Wrinkle in Time, when I was a kid. I loved the book. I thought it was awesome. I did not see the movie; although I wanted to. If it is not a re-creation of the book, but rather a sexist screed, should they be surprised that it failed where the book succeeded? Seriously, the book was awesome. WTF people?