Not only that, but I don't trust myself to remember how I calibrated myself to the rating system in the past. If I'm more stingy with the 5-star ratings now than I was 2 years ago, then I'm going to skew things in a way that the system probably can't understand.
In other words, it not only expects me to define my own scale, it also expects me to stay consistent with it over time. I don't think that's realistic.
I honestly wouldn't mind if from time to time, a service asked me to stack-rank movies. Because that would be a question I feel confident I can answer. Give me two movies and ask me to say I prefer A, prefer B, or don't have a clear preference. Or give me 5 movies and have me put them order from best to worst, allowing me to say two of them tied or exclude some. Maybe the UI on this would be too weird for average users, though.
Relative individual consistency is not a necessary component in these systems, except perhaps in the most simplistic. It’s not exactly difficult to introduce temporal normalization / regularization into these models.
I don’t have any specific knowledge of Netflix per se, but I suspect the granularity of a 5 point rating system just proved to be superfluous. Even a +1 / -1 rating is probably sufficiently proxied by a simple measure of completion percentage (appropriately normalized).
> Even a +1 / -1 rating is probably sufficiently proxied by a simple measure of completion percentage (appropriately normalized).
I'm just hoping they're not making the same mistake here that they're making in the UI: showing movies I watched to the end as "continue watching", because I closed them on the end credits roll.
In other words, it not only expects me to define my own scale, it also expects me to stay consistent with it over time. I don't think that's realistic.
I honestly wouldn't mind if from time to time, a service asked me to stack-rank movies. Because that would be a question I feel confident I can answer. Give me two movies and ask me to say I prefer A, prefer B, or don't have a clear preference. Or give me 5 movies and have me put them order from best to worst, allowing me to say two of them tied or exclude some. Maybe the UI on this would be too weird for average users, though.