I used Netflix stars to make personal notes on their titles. One star corresponded to the old ‘not interested’ two stars meant probably not interested. Three, okay etc.
Now I have only two choices. My style is cramped. I am assuming there is no longer any way to hack Netflix with my personal information. Is that correct.
For those who have no idea what the OP is talking about, it helps to understand that the Netflix DVD-by-mail service switched this week from having customers rate movies on a scale of one to five to having customers rate movies with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down.
And as for the OP, there’s nothing stopping you from just maintaining a list of the movies you saw on Netflix and rating them yourself, or rating the movies on IMDB, which has, I think, a ten-point rating scale.
I believe it also affects the streaming variety of Netflix, too.
So far, it has *only *affected my streaming, *not *my DVDs.
Their reasoning for why they did it was something along the lines of:
“A lot of people will rate documentaries 5 stars, but comedies 3 stars. But those same people watch far more comedies than documentaries despite rating them lower. The new system will do more to determine what you actually watch.”
The reasoning seems odd to me.
It’s true that most people don’t really use the full range of the five-star rating system, and have some weird biases. But some people do use the full range, and even for the people who don’t, the Big Data crunchers at Netflix ought to be able to figure out who does and doesn’t.
So it seems weird to limit the inputs that users can provide. Unless maybe they have data that shows that the extra degrees of freedom result in fewer people rating things to begin with.
Netflix already has a much more complicated way of ranking things for a given user: the order in which it presents suggestions.
YouTube switched from a five-star system to a thumbs up/thumbs down system what seems like ages ago.
Their reasoning was that 90% of viewers only rated videos with one star or five stars, never in between, so why maintain a more complex system.
I wish it were optional. I don’t know if 3 stars is thumbs up or down for me. And I’d just say “meh, who cares” but I watch a lot of stand up comedy and I rate them so I know I’ve seen them. They all blend together after a while. And I might have liked this person’s special a lot so I’ll watch it again, but the one the next year was ok the first time, not enough to rewatch. Can’t distinguish enough. I’m not going to start an excel spreadsheet for it. Not going to cancel my subscription. I’m just going to complain on the internet like a normal American.
Likewise. I used the five stars for my own purposes. I could not care what Netflix thinks of my encrypted notes. Now they have reduced my encrypted note options.