Netflix changing its rating system

A bad thing, IMO. Some films I can't give a simple thumbs up or down. I found their stars rating system to be helpful.

It depends on whether they put a percentage of thumbs up/down or just have a simple binary system. If it's only the latter then it's a bad thing. Years ago I remember looking up movies on Amazon's dvds and discovered that almost no films got below three out of five stars. However, I was able to make this useful for me by assuming a three star movie was actually worth one or two stars, a four star was worth more like three and a five star was worth four or five. If you have a percentage you can still tell relatively what will be good for you, but if they only put a thumbs up or down, it's worthless and people will have to rely on outside sources for reviews.

I think that's a bad thing. Not nuanced enough. Horrible movies will be in the same category as semi-decent movies, and "just above average" movies will be in the same category as masterpieces.

It feels like these companies just change things just to change things. Why fix whats not broken (sort of like with the IMDb boards).

If its just a thumbs up and thumbs down how will that even work? There needs to be some sort of percentage on it so you can separate each movie/tv show.

I'm very skeptical as to the possible benefit, but they claim that a test group of viewers was twice as likely to rate a title when given up/down choices vs. the five-star scale.

Bad thing!
It's basically lumping a lot of grey shades into black or white.
for me, 1 star means dislike because they don't let you choose 0 stars.
Anything over 1, means different degrees of like.
two to five stars is all thumbs up, to different extents.
1- Did not like at all. would give 0 stars if I could. Could not find anything worthwhile in it.
2- Not great but not totally worthless either. Overall mediocre, but had some good parts.
3- Pretty good overall, not special but decently entertaining. (3 stars is probably my most commonly used rating)
4- Very good but with some small flaws
5- Just perfect in every way. A work of art. These are rare.

So now a 5 star movie will get the same rating as a 2 or 3 star movie. A masterpiece will be the same as something just average. Everyone gets a trophy. I hate this.
Fuck the dumbing down of everything.

Bad thing, definitely. Every site always has to try to fix what isn't broken, and thereby makes things worse.

The five category rating system has been found optimal for recommender systems by these guys https://grouplens.org/ and other research which is probably why Netflix used it in the first place.

🇲​🇪​🇲​🇴​🇷​🇪​🇽