[ehhnetfliz]

Ehh, netflix switched to that. It's even less useful now: there's no way to indicate you really like a show vs it's not terrible; this means your taste approximately correlates with abailable content, not content you prefer.

The real win would be empowering the user to choose their own rating style. I don't see this happening because it's much harder to push content at users this way.

[mrexroad]

To be fair, Netflix is less interested in that you liked the thing itself, and more interested in the attributes of the films you liked or watched to the end. Note, this is based on an article from 2014 [1], but a good read nonetheless.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-n...

[ehhnetfliz]

Right, but they don't ask me what I like about it. Judging by their recommendations they certainly aren't discerning it well.

Netflix is interesting because their content is pretty bad (compared to say IMDB they have very few movies); recommendations are incredibly useful to pretend its library is much larger than it actually is.

I wonder why they didn't go the amazon route of actual reviews + semantic analysis.

Mostly I just hate cross referencing netflix with reviews to figure out if it's worth my time.

[zolloie]

That's the funny thing to me, that people are using Netflix as an example. To me, Netflix ratings are just about the most useless ratings of all the ratings I'm aware of, maybe even more so than Amazon's ratings.

There's also things to consider, like time, that becomes relevant. Dichotomous ratings are known to be inferior statistically speaking, but they are faster, so there's a convenience angle. Tradeoffs.

These discussions always get frustrating to me because there's so much armchair ad hoc stuff that goes on when there's a huge scientific literature on this already.

People also don't seem to be aware of the assumptions they're making. About ratings being skewed, for example: for a lot of products, people probably do kind of want to know basically "is this meeting my needs?" and then everything is just a decrement away from that. Laundry detergent, for example, is something where I want it to clean my clothes well without damaging them. Why should that be normally distributed?

Also, there's a difference between ratings and how they're used. My guess is that 1-3 star rating variance is meaningful from an experiential point of view, but not from a purchasing point of view. That is, if you had the choice of a 3-star product or a 1-star product, I think people would prefer the 3-star product. When we say "1-3 stars don't matter" we don't actually mean that, we mean that they don't matter because it's below our threshold of what we'd be willing to spend money on.