Netflix Apps Will Today Begin Ditching Star-Based Rating System for Thumbs

[earthTOmitchel]

"This system confused many users over the years, who believed that the stars were a community aggregate of a show's overall quality, not a personal recommendation system tailored for each user."

Wait, it's not a community aggregate?! Had I know that I would have found it much more helpful.

This appears to be the consensus haha, you weren't the only one that didn't know!
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In response to Amy Schumer's historically bad star ratings?

Not exactly, because that star rating will change for every user depending on their personal tastes. Of course, since most people saw one star (who maybe don't like stand up specials) and believed that to be the show's "rating," it's easy to see why a lot of people might not have watched it because of that.

As far as I understand, however, percentages will function the same way. So now instead of 1/5 stars, you'll see something like "20% Match."

 

[ILikeAllOS]

In response to Amy Schumer's historically bad star ratings?

Wrong.
This now actually makes it even easier to downvote her.

 

[supercoolmanchu]

Three cheers for spoon fed infotainment!
Where would we be without anonymous ratings and paid critics?

I wish instead of stars or thumbs, Netflix just punched a hole, put in a bullring, and led people directly by the nose. Easier, less scary and confusing for those who lack the ability to scroll and select giant thumbnails on a screen without external validation.

 

[Juicy Box]

The most logical rating system is thumbs up/thumbs down (tomato/smashed tomato) with user percentages like used in rotten tomatoes. Nothing mysterious about that. Someone at nextflix really over thought the rating system last time to the point that it was meaningless & worthless.

Good point. While I don't always agree with the Rotten Tomatoes score, I like to look it up to see what it is. Netflix rating system never really worked for me. I am not saying a thumb system would be better though.

One show that I thought was really good, but showed as a 3-star rating for me was Legend, Sean Bean was awesome in that. I would have given it 5-stars. But, some of Netflix's original shows show as a really high rating, which I find as really bad quality shows. One of which is Sense8. That show was horrible.

As for Rotten Tomato, sometimes I agree with them, but sometimes the rating is way off imo. Example, Furious7 has a higher rating than StarWars VI, unbreakable, and Gladiator. Also, I think that The IronFist rating was too low. While it wasn't nearly as good as DD, it isn't as bad as many of the critics say it is.

Interesting. I just wish the Netflix app for my ATV 3 would get updated. I find the interface to be clunky compared to the one on my Roku.

I personally love the ATV3 Netflix app, as it is very easy to navigate, find sub-genres, and gives a lot more information about the movie I am viewing (such as actors, writers, directors, and other movies that those people participated in).

I never used the Roku Netflix though, and I was comparing the ATV3 version to the ATV4 which sucks with its endless swiping to get anywhere.

 

[TMRJIJ]

In response to Amy Schumer's historically bad star ratings?

BAHAHAHAHA!!!.... and She blames 'Alt-Rights Trolls' for her lack of talent and bad Netflix ratings.

She's so terrible it's funny.

 

[HDFan]

I have no issues with the star system and Netflix ratings. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. I'm actually a bit surprised at it's accuracy given all of the variations of humanity.

What I am really very unhappy about is that I order my lists and queues by stars. 5 star being those few "best movie I've ever seen", 4 "great movie, see again", 3 "liked it, but not again" 2 "not my thing" 1 "absolutely hated it".

Not only does it destroy my queue management, but with just an "up/down" I can't find those 4 and 5 star movies that I want to watch again.

I am a very unhappy Netflix customer who has been with them from the beginning. I called support and they are taking feedback right now so if you are unhappy with the system let them know.

 

[supercoolmanchu]

I personally love the ATV3 Netflix app, as it is very easy to navigate, find sub-genres, and gives a lot more information about the movie I am viewing (such as actors, writers, directors, and other movies that those people participated in).

I never used the Roku Netflix though, and I was comparing the ATV3 version to the ATV4 which sucks with its endless swiping to get anywhere.

Agree the previous AT3 one was much better, although it wasn't going to win any beauty pageants. The difference? The previous UI was Apple designed. The new UI fail is all Netflix.

The Netflix app on AppleTV 4 is a mess. The sizing of the thumbnails is absurdly awkward, ridiculous content shrink on the end of every show, just a tremendously poor use of screen real estate all around. The sorting categories on the main page are incredibly redundant, an obvious cheat to make their content library seem bigger.

From launch it's a disaster with the obnoxious profile selector front page (we only use one at home). Why does that even show up for accounts only using a single (or no) 'profile'?

Maybe Netflix can turn firing their UI designers into a show? I'd watch that.

 

[Juicy Box]

Agree the previous AT3 one was much better, although it wasn't going to win any beauty pageants. The difference? The previous UI was Apple designed. The new UI fail is all Netflix.

The Netflix app on AppleTV 4 is a mess. The sizing of the thumbnails is absurdly awkward, ridiculous content shrink on the end of every show, just a tremendously poor use of screen real estate all around. The sorting categories on the main page are incredibly redundant, an obvious cheat to make their content library seem bigger.

From launch it's a disaster with the obnoxious profile selector front page (we only use one at home). Why does that even show up for accounts only using a single (or no) 'profile'?

Maybe Netflix can turn firing their UI designers into a show? I'd watch that.

You made some good points.

Agree the previous AT3 one was much better, although it wasn't going to win any beauty pageants.

This is basically the biggest flaw imo, although it is a small one. The ATV4 Netflix app visually looks nicer, but the UI is not very user friendly when compared to the ATV3 version.

ridiculous content shrink on the end of every show

And you cannot make it back into full screen again. I wish this "feature" could be disabled.

sorting categories on the main page are incredibly redundant

Another issue with this is that the categories are not in a set order. I am sure I am not the only one that uses "recently played" or "my list" category regularly. Why do I have to go search for it all the time.

Maybe Netflix can turn firing their UI designers into a show? I'd watch that.

The thing is, the ATV4 version is similar to other non-ATV3 Netflix apps I have seen. While I find the ATV4 version to suck more than a crackwhore mother on the last day of the month, many people are used to it, and find the ATV3 version, once they use it, to be odd. I guess they like the endless swiping to find stuff to watch.

I personally think the ATV3, while not the prettiest version, is a simple, easiest to use Netflix app, and it does this while giving a lot more useful information, like actors, directors, related shows...

 

[dysamoria]

What a bunch of crap. Pathological capitalism keeps killing products and services. Anything remotely detailed or thoughtful gets reduced to impulsive black and white, all or nothing, bipolar behavior. It cannot possibly be good for human behavior to reduce the number of places humans are expected to think a little bit about something.

 

[M.PaulCezanne]

Hmm... Don't psychologists call that dangerous "black & white" thinking?

Those ratings are never in line with my tastes anyway. Seems like they're all 5 stars.

 

[onehoop]

I, for ome, am extremely disappointed. I took quite a bit of time to rate programs that I liked that I had seen in other media so that it would be better at predicting what I would like.

The star rating it displayed is what it thought you would rate it as. Because of all my ratings, it was extremely accurate.

Without the star rating system, I have little reason not to drop Netflix. Before, I was afraid that I would lose my ratings history when/if I came back.

 

[Michael Goff]

I, for ome, am extremely disappointed. I took quite a bit of time to rate programs that I liked that I had seen in other media so that it would be better at predicting what I would like.

The star rating it displayed is what it thought you would rate it as. Because of all my ratings, it was extremely accurate.

Without the star rating system, I have little reason not to drop Netflix. Before, I was afraid that I would lose my ratings history when/if I came back.

I'm confused. Are you subscribed to Netflix to watch things or rate things?