Comment by Fifer82 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fifer82 | Hacker News Reader

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> The stars are not about "enjoyment" factor, they are about perceived quality

I ignore ratings because of that. They don't mean anything and I am guilty.

On Good Reads, I have given what is deemed as a trashy piece of writing 5 stars. At the same time, I have given Dune 1 star because the story was garbage.

So what is this 5 star rating? Some people say it is the experience, some say it is the writing style, others say it is the story telling, or the plot.

Lets also face it, when it comes to films, the news papers have their own agendas and personal commitments to other agencies. My film could be absolutely garbage, but since I dined with the Editor a few times, It gets 4/5 stars and then, it gets 4/5 stars because the rest of the population is told how to feel.

I would even say that this whole system of rating based on Stars or Likes can simply be removed. If a film is good, you will know about it. If a film has been watched 1000000 times more this weekend than another, base it on that if anything.

When I rate things it's usually an "overall" rating, rather than weigh one dimension disproportionately. Which is why I would almost never grant a 5-star rating to something. But I'll dish out 2, 3 and some 4s regularly.

That is only you, I can't use that information. Like you might be taking into consideration "Special effects were 3 on their own". Whereas my Mum would never even consider that as a thing which influences the rating.

I understand that. It's not perfect and I don't think the assumption is that it was but more that overall people as a group will smooth those rough edges. In other words the majority will compensate for the minority who use the ratings system differently.

For all the faults of the old system, the new one is even worse. Like Pandora, I'll probably just never rate things or mostly just give them a down vote if they don't crack a threshold of goodness.

Which is fine, because the recommendation engine should be using your history, not someone else's. They gave it a 5, you have it a 1. They will see recommendations for similar movies and you won't.

Your thesis is basically, ratings mean absolutely nothing, and how good something is should solely be based on how popular it is?

The problem as I understand it is that the "rating space" is multidimensional (a piece can be funny with great plot but bad writing compensated for by a great lead and awesome special effects although the set design was inconsistent) but all of this has to be projected into a 1-dimensional system.

And the rub is that not everybody uses the same projection, which means the utility of one person's rating for another unknown their projection system (the weight they give to each sub-component of the overall rating) is completely unknown.

A much more succinct way of making the point. Thank you.

This is a very clarifying way to put it thank you.

Yes, the whole thing is meaningless but atleast views offer some glimpse. I would have given Barb Wire 6/5 as I was a teenager with a crush on Pamela. How can that relate to a rating of a film that you could use?

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