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Comment by lanevorockz | Hacker News Reader

The more information the better, thing is platforms want to sell their content first and foremost. This removal of user input was pushed by the business so they could push content regardless of personal interest.

Ever wonder why Netflix keeps on pushing bad content ?

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One reason to keep on pushing bad content despite knowing the user will not watch them is to hide the fact how small their catalogue is and shift the blame onto user's particular taste.

Do you have any evidence for that claim, or is that pure speculation on your part?

I don't have any written or direct evidence, however I worked for a public service broadcaster, who regularly dealt with Apple and Netflix, and the feedback from both was that star-rankings were driving a lot of royalty payments and user choice (people would ignore poorly ranked content). The impact of this was that low performing content providers made less money. By removing the collective scoring, the company would implement their own recommendations algorithms, which gave them the ability to both deliver 'better' recommendations based on what the user consumed and spread the royalty payments more broadly. If what you wanted was to see what everyone else was watching/listening to though, that's not in the interest of their business. Anecdotal and third hand but I believe the people that relayed this to me.

That makes sense, thanks for elaborating! I could imagine a different solution where instead you just don't report the overall star-average, to make it a harder metric to game, but still get to have a stronger feedback signal for your recommendations.

> "Netflix Ditches 5 Star Rating System, Is Amy Schumer to Blame?"

> "This past week, Netflix officially debuted their new Amy Schumer stand-up comedy hour The Leather Special. And it was instantaneously met with negative reviews. Some claim that Schumer's biggest critics got on Netflix and purposely drove down the rating of the special, some without even watching it. Schumer herself blames the 'Alt-Right' for sabotaging her latest effort. Now, it is being announced that Netflix is ditching its five-star rating system for something much more streamlined, a rating system that owes itself to the legacy of the late Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Did Amy Schumer have anything to do with this new rating system? Probably not. But once in place, it will certainly help her Leather Special find a more appropriate audience."

https://movieweb.com/netflix-cancels-5-star-rating-system/

'Probably not', but it sure seemed like coincidental timing to me.

I can’t even imagine the senior product and data people I’ve listened to deciding to change this based on one artists experience.

I'm pretty sure stars were discontinued because the best proxy for "what you will spend time watching, is what you spent time watching" and not your curated ratings. As in: the datapoint they funneled into their models was "time spent on video X" and not, "rating on video X".

Business of course wants to keep churn low, and they think time spent on the site is the best way to do that.

That (and "people mostly don't use ratings beside 1 and 5") is at least the reasoning I've read every time I've seen this topic mentioned in blogs/talks.

I do also feel Netflix is pushing it's in-house content way more these last few years, to the detriment of their recommendations though.

What is Apple selling to have so little settings in MacOS? ;)

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