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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: 5, Insightful) by driven on Sunday March 19 2017, @02:30PM (5 children)

    by driven (6295) on Sunday March 19 2017, @02:30PM (#481141)

    * make it a user preference whether to auto-preview a movie when I hover over it. I just want to read the description in peace, not be constantly shown movie clips while browsing.
    * let me eliminate entire genres from what is suggested to me. I don't like horror movies.
    * 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.
    * 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.
    * broaden support for the offline downloading feature. I discovered my Android tablet doesn't let me download because it's not on their HCL (hardware compatibility list) even though it meets the Android version and is powerful enough (based on the fact I can play downloaded Google Play movies on it).
    * bring back "not interested" which seems to have gone away.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:04PM (1 child)

    by Marand (1081) on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:04PM (#481150) Journal

    broaden support for the offline downloading feature.

    Broaden the selection of downloadable titles, too. It's especially puzzling that Netflix's own content isn't consistently downloadable; it's like they don't have faith in their own platform.

    • (Score: 2) by fishybell on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:20PM

      by fishybell (3156) on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:20PM (#481157)

      I'm guessing it's the variety of licenses each different movie studio requires.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:42PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:42PM (#481172) Journal

    * 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?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @04:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @04:26PM (#481190)

    Only a very small subset of the genres that Netflix uses show up like that. They're ones that most people are likely to consider watching. I'm guessing the code for that would be rather problematic as some platforms like the set top boxes and Android don't give you a way of directly selecting one of those secret genres.

    http://instantwatcher.com/genres/all [instantwatcher.com]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @07:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @07:37PM (#481237)

    This is just going to be a disaster. Parents will not agree.

    Me: ban La La Land, Moonlight, Brokeback Mountain, Apocalypse Now, Cars 2, The China Syndrome, JFK, Midnight in Paris, Milk, SiCKO, Truth, V for Vendetta, Avatar, 2017 Beauty and the Beast, Elysium, Good Will Hunting, Lethal Weapon 4, Lethal Weapon 3, An Inconvenient Truth, Arctic Tale, Bowling for Columbine...

    On the other hand, I'm fine with: Human Centipede, Human Centipede 2, Blackhawk Down, The Killing Fields, Psycho, Predator, Terminator, and most straight porn.