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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?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:42PM
* let me eliminate entire genres from what is suggested to me. I don't like horror movies.
Is this not an option? I know the system has changed a lot over the years, but when I first started rating movies on Netflix (about 15 years ago), I feel like you could explicitly say which genres you wanted to see and which you never wanted recommended. At some point, the categories became more nuanced (rather than just "horror" and "action" etc., you could specify whether you'd like more "action horror rom-coms that take place in a courtroom and based on literature" or whatever). I'm frankly too lazy to even log in to Netflix now, but if they got rid of genre restrictions, that just seems dumb. Even if you might like the occasional horror film, why not give you control to say, "I just don't want them showing up in my recommendations"?
* give better parental controls. last time i tried parental controls, the selection seemed to go down to the equivalent of Barney and Friends for toddlers. I just don't want crazy stuff coming up in the browse for a pre-teen/young teen account.
As I recall, there (at least used to be) categories that would come up with stuff like "movies for 8-10 year olds" or "movies for 6-8" or something like that. Wouldn't it be trivial to implement those subcategories as selectable for parental controls?
* make UI's more consistent across device platforms. for example, "what's related" is missing on some platforms, so I have to use my web browser for that feature.
Yeah, I really dislike the apps on some platforms. I've hated the Netflix "wall of movies" format in many apps ever since it first appeared quite a few years ago. For some reason, a Roku app (for example) is set to display thousands of random films with a seemingly infinite scroll, but they can't display 10 movies that are related/similar to something you just watched or are searching for... which you actually might be interested in viewing? Makes no sense. And why can't they implement a reasonable search that would look for actors, directors, etc. too (as available on their website), rather than just a poor, incredibly basic title search?