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: 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.