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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: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:27PM (3 children)
I'll fully admit that I'm an outlier in my tastes, for whom a mass-market rating system is probably never going to be a good fit.
My first reaction to this headline is: "Isn't that removing some granularity in ratings which will make the recommendations worse?"
But on second thought, it's probably for the best. Back when I first got Netflix (ca. 2002?), I must have spent at a couple hours going through and searching for films I had seen and rating them. I had faith that the system would at least be somewhat helpful in providing me good recommendations for my tastes. But over the years, it has been such a mixed bag that I really don't pay much attention to the "ratings" anymore.
I think one problem with Netflix is that they don't make it as clear that the supposed "ratings" you see aren't a summary of ratings from ALL Netflix users, but rather an estimation of what they think "people like you" will rate the film. Even after repeatedly trying to explain this to my parents, for example, my father still frequently will say, "I watched this movie last night, and it was terrible. But it had five stars!" And I yet again try to explain that isn't some sort of rating by educated critics or even a summary of all Netflix users, but some sort of algorithm trying to match films to him... and failing. A lot of people just don't get it.
Another issue is the "grade inflation" effect. A lot of the public these days has been trained to think "What I give people a five-star rating, I need to give them five stars as long as things are basically acceptable." How many times have you been told -- directly or indirectly -- by service folks that anything below 5 stars will get them fired or demoted or whatever? Part of my problem (I'm sure) is that I refused the grade inflation effect. I viewed the stars sort of as standard deviations, and a 5-star rating is incredibly rare for me (as is a 1-star rating, for that matter). I naively thought that doing so would guarantee that I'd only get recommended stuff that was really close to stuff I LOVED, but I'm sure my rating behavior isn't common. I imagine, just like Amazon reviews or whatever, you get a huge number of 5s, a lot of 1s, a few 4s, and that's pretty much it except for the "weird people" like me who actually like to leave balanced reviews of 2s or 3s.
Given the kind of rating behavior I expect most people engage in, a "thumbs" system probably isn't that much worse and might even be a more accurate reflection of how most people are using the system.
Finally, I'd just note that there's just no room for nuance in star ratings anyway. I remember Roger Ebert's system where he said he tried to give ratings based on expectations within the film's genre, for example. Thus, even if Ebert thought stereotypical rom-coms were pointless and an exercise in rolling out standard genre tropes, he wouldn't give them all terrible ratings. He'd instead give a lot of middling ratings, and even good ratings for those that took a few steps to be outside the norm and mildly interesting.
There's no way to express the nuance of your ratings in a 5-star system. For example, there are a number of films over the years that I've loved ironically. That is, I may dislike the genre itself, but some films are just so over-the-top that they become amusing or interesting for "meta" reasons. What do I rate such films? Because if I rate a Norwegian disaster film with 5 stars on Netflix because it's more over-the-top than any Hollywood disaster film I've seen and thus just becomes hilarious to me, Netflix is just going to fill my suggestions with Norwegian films and disaster movies, neither of which I'm likely to appreciate. (Well, I've actually seen a few decent Norwegian films, but that's beside the point.) So then rating becomes sort of like "gaming the system," but if other people are giving ratings to game the system, at what point does it become more dysfunctional?
TL;DR -- My personal "Thumbs down" to any ratings systems on Netflix. I've had much better luck spending five minutes skimming reviews online rather than trusting Netflix's system, despite having rated maybe 1000 movies over the years in it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 19 2017, @04:10PM
Even after repeatedly trying to explain this to my parents, for example, my father still frequently will say, "I watched this movie last night, and it was terrible. But it had five stars!" And I yet again try to explain that isn't some sort of rating by educated critics or even a summary of all Netflix users, but some sort of marketing algorithm trying to sell films to him... and succeeding.
Just fixing some things there. This reminds me of the "fake market" story [soylentnews.org]. IMHO if Netflix were really matching your interests to like-minded people, it wouldn't be wrong so often. The algorithms for that aren't that hard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @04:29PM
It doesn't really make reviews worse unless you were somebody that regularly rated things using all of those stars. I have a feeling that people either weren't using it at all or they were only using some of the stars in most cases. A simple up or down vote is more likely to be used and when analyzed with the other ratings is probably more helpful than the 4 star system where Netflix has no way of knowing what the ratings really mean as people have different standards for what they would consider a particular rating. Some people will rate things as 4 if they enjoyed them and some will only rate them 4 if they consider it to be a masterpiece.
Whereas with an up or down vote, it's much more consistent in assessing what the viewers intent was in giving the rating.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:40PM
The 5 star system was far too subjective anyway. Does each star have equal value? Or do you do like the White Wolf RPG system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling_System) whereby 1 is weak 2 is average 3 is strong, and 4 and 5 are only reserved for superhuman or supernatural traits.
I think a thumbs up/down system (similar to what is in Valve's Steam platform) is much better, because you end up with a score out of 100% with which to compare one game to another.