Right, but what about consumers that want the rating to be meaningful? Assumably netflix has a history of videos you've seen entirely; they don't need your rating to know you consumed it.
Personally I just stop watching the moment I feel regret—the thumbs down button has no role in how I consume.
Two star ratings, though—that is meaningful, at least to me.
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.
What does a thumbs up mean, though? In a netflix context, am i recommending it to others? Trying to train the recommendation for my own taste? Making sure i rewatch it if I don't remember watching it the first time? What do I do if i like a movie but it's objectively terrible? All of the above questions weigh heavily, and the end result is I just avoid binary voting systems (including voting on hn) and it becomes feature bloat with little use.
Strangely, it gets even harder with the thumbs down—there are vanishingly few things i actively wish didn't exist. Why downvote at all?
In my experience, my favorite movies I find via glowing reviews. Rotten tomato completely obscures this view: if all the reviewers kind of like it, it'll get 100%, whereas polarizing films always suffer. I'll take "kids" over "star wars" any day for a better movie. Why? I'm gonna see star wars because i want to, not because I expect a meaningful aesthetic. But Rotten Tomatoes takes the opposite tact, pushing me towards crowd favorites rather than what i might rate highly.
Really this comes down to how terrible one dimensional comparisons are: it only measure popularity, which is a terrible filter for quality.
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.
Personally I just stop watching the moment I feel regret—the thumbs down button has no role in how I consume.
Two star ratings, though—that is meaningful, at least to me.