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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 19 2017, @01:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the live-or-die dept.

At Netflix, the stars are out.

Not movie stars, per se, but rather the streaming service's system for rating the programs they watched with one to five stars. Instead, users will soon be able to express their level of enjoyment with a thumbs up for favorable or a thumbs down for unfavorable.

"Five stars feels very yesterday now," Todd Yellin, Netflix's vice president of product innovation, told a group of journalists at the company's Los Gatos headquarters on Thursday. That system "really projects what you think you want to tell the world. But we want to move to a system where it's really clear, when members rate, that it's for them, and to keep on making the Netflix experience better and better."

The company had beta tested the Facebook-like system with hundreds of thousands of new users around the world last year, finding that more than 200 percent more ratings were logged with the thumb system than the star system.

They should make it fun. Use the 5 💩 rating system instead. Or perhaps a whole suite of symbols for a more fine-grained response. Any suggestions?


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:08PM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:08PM (#481152)

    The funniest meme which may or may not be true is Amy Schumer was getting made fun of, so they had to change the ratings system.

    It doesn't even matter if you think the meme is true or not, its just as funny either way.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:14PM (#481155)

    It is indeed true and it is indeed funny. Fat, unfunny gurl gets bad reviews so they have to alter the rating system to appease her, I mean it's not like she could just go on a diet and work on her material.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Sunday March 19 2017, @06:42PM (1 child)

    by jmorris (4844) on Sunday March 19 2017, @06:42PM (#481223)

    Entertainment Weekly [ew.com] isn't exactly a bastion of the alt-right and they mention it in their reporting too. The spergs from [48]chan and /pol/ made fun of a special princess who happens to be a close relative of the Senate Minority Leader so "Something Must Be Done!"

    I suspect Netflix, like every tech company was testing many alternatives and had actually been testing the thumbs up/down as they claim. But the decision to switch and the timing was almost certainly driven by this story and the knowledge that after a successful (as in media attention grabbing) run there would be more. So now the feature that is barely mentioned is the story. Read the accounts carefully and you will see it the up/down is not the important part, the addition of a social graph is. Since Netflix itself lacks a full enough graph to make that happen, watch for the word to slowly filter out of a partnership with someone who does, Google or Facebook being the obvious choices. Now snowflakes won't be aware of what the "wrong people" think. And slowly but surely, as their confidence in identifying "wrong people" grows, the ratings of those people just won't count at all.

    • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday March 20 2017, @12:44AM

      by Magic Oddball (3847) on Monday March 20 2017, @12:44AM (#481305) Journal

      It doesn't mention that the two events are related (e.g. a "something must be done" situation), just that she happened to gripe about alt-right trolls sabotaging the ratings.

      I don't care either way about Schumer, but there's so many unfounded assumptions of this type on both sides of the political spectrum screwing the signal-to-noise ratio that I feel like those of us who are (theoretically?) smart enough to know better really should avoid adding to the clusterfuck.