That’s true. However, although the rating system is incredibly complex (I wholeheartedly accept that), the one thing that appears to be consistent, If I see a movie rated 2.8 by over 56k movie goers, I can make a save assumption that that movie is not worth it. This is the one thing I feel is the exception to the rule. While our tastes are incredibly different, mass voting is important, because that movie would appeal to a great number of audiences who like “said type of movie.” It’s the one situation I believe overrides bots & spam.
Note: If you do decide to watch “Death Of Me,” prepared to be baffled or annoyed. Now, without giving spoilers, the ending showed me that there may be a sequil. I hope it’s better than this one. The only reason this got buzz was because a Hemsworth brother is in it.
Yeah. When you couple that with certain genres can be tricky too. For example B-movies and 20 year olds; I think younger people are more likely give B-movies lower ratings. But B-movies is special kind of genre for certain types of people. I don’t think (in my opinion) we can rate a B-movie in the same way we would any other type of movie, simply because they’re made to be low budget.
That movie is worth it though If you like parody movies it’s quite entertaining regardless of the low rating. I think the problem is that only certain types of people engage with rating systems and the ratings tend to be weighted to favour movies people feel like they are supposed to like because marketing has told them so, rather than movies they actually enjoy.
Yeah… It also occurred to me that our demographics has changed dramatically. I suppose this will make using these rating systems more difficult. I think in this day and age, reviewing a movie requires more critical thinking, and knowing how to make allowances for certain movies. As streaming becomes more and more global, more foreigners are watching more American movies, and the different cultures doesn’t always translate well. However, at the same time, you also figure out which countries usually make the best type of genres. For instance, in my opinion I think Indian/hindi & Asian/mandarin/Taiwan tend to make the best horror movies.
Well, being low budget doesn’t necessarily mean a lower quality movie. Some major expense is big name actor salaries in other productions. So, yeah you’re probably right in the majority of cases that low budget can be lousy, there are exceptions to the rule and thus there is a certain nuance in objectively using ratings.
You can tell that I’m fond of ratings and comments — I always take the time to read them for movies/shows I’m interested in.
Great conversation guys, I’d like to join in with my thoughts on that…
Nowadays I dislike metacritics the most. All these Washington Post, NYT and so on critics writing their opinions - most the time I strongly disagree with them and many official critics I feel try too hard to have a different opinion then the mainstream.
Because let’s face it: the best indicator for a good movie/show is the mainstream for most times. Otherwise, why would everyone watch it?!
RT… i Never really liked the system. First I didn’t understand it completely so I ignored it, now I just ignore it (for the most part).
IMDb was for years my go to checkup website. In my opinion, when it comes to tv shows the site is still one of the better indication giving sites. I agree with a lot of their overall rating.
Movies not so much anymore, shows getting worse by the year as well. Too many 1/10 or 10/10 ratings just to “counter all the bad/top ratings” which just doesn’t make sense…
And unfortunately there are more and more people on Trakt doing exactly that. Also rating a show with 10/10 before even a trailer launched just because?
I like Trakts rating system although I think regarding shows it should automatically take the average rating for a season after you rated all episodes and the same for the show. At least have that as an option.
Regarding movies I trust mostly the trailer.
Recommendations from friends/family still is a good indicator.
Reading comments… well there are too many (sorry) stupid and/or lazy people out there not able to use the spoilers button. So it’s always a risk and it got me more then a couple of times…
Ratings shmatings. People like what they like. That said, Metacritic is the one go to most, and whose system I find the most useful. IMDB ratings can be tossed in the trash as far as I’m concerned.
Movie & TV ratings can be incorporated with your own opinion and evaluation. For movies… I like RT. Just cause Rotten Tomatoes “critics” give a high score does Not necessarily mean you should watch that movie.
For TV ratings I almost always use IMDB. Once again, people need to use these ratings as a tool to further investigate, research, and view trailers.
Ha! and when it comes to movie and TV trailers… I NEVER ever watch the complete trailer. I highly recommend doing this in order for one to complete there own thoughts, opinions and potentially watching that particular movie/ TV show.
tldr; I believe personal recommendations > ratings and we need to lean more on that
As a slight tangent, I do agree that personal recommendations are the most reliable. That’s kind of where we’re going with the new recommend button. I understand ratings are not the same as recommendations, but when selecting a movie to watch, I believe both are used to the same end goal.
My perfect system goes like this… (don’t hold me to this, we’re still trying to figure out what’s possible hardware-wise behind the scenes)
User’s like yourselves get to recommend a certain amount of items. We need to limit recommendations in some way so that users don’t go ham and recommend everything they watch (25 total, 1 per month, 10 per year… ).
These recommendations are used to elevate top tier movie/show choices to the people that follow you.
a. Example, I follow 20 people total. We add up all the recommendations from those 20 people and sort by the most recommended. (already works like this)
We use the recommended items to provide similar user suggestions
a. If I have 20 out of 25 recommendations in common with another user, we probably have very similar taste and it would benefit me to see what else they like.
b. This is another reason I want to limit recommended items. It will make people really think before recommending and create a strong relation between similar users.
User’s find more likeminded users and get better recommendations.
The only thing i dislike about this is this creates an echo chamber effect to some degree. Still thinking about how to create variation here so that I might get recommended something that is great, but not in my normal wheel house of what I watch.
This is pretty spot on with what is rolling around in my head…
For myself a rating system from 1-10 like we have now is irreplaceable because I need that just for my own comparison but more and more I turn away from looking at other peoples ratings - especially before watching something.
I’m just getting warm with the recommendation option but I already started to set my own rules for what I’m recommending from the get go. My recommendations will be limited to shows I completed and rated with 10/10. Because that’s without a doubt what I recommend. That’s also limiting things.
But a lot of people will use the button more carelessly. So inevitably there has to be a limit. Also as you mention the bubble thing is a problem. But maybe recommendations ultimately could become more of a social network thing. Like lists has become at letterboxd. Give people a place to discuss their favorites - not only with comments underneath the show but more like a little forum within the system. I think letterboxd does a great job in that regard. And it’s something I’m entirely missing on Trakt. Discussions are limited to comments. It’s not even possible to send someone from your friends list a “recommendation”
Having spent the last 10+ years working on recommendation systems, finally porting my knowledge to build a personal movie recommender 6 months ago to get me through the viropocalypse: average rating systems and expert rating systems (e.g. rotten tomatoes viewer & critic numbers) are fatally flawed as a tool for filtering what YOU should watch. That seems kinda obvious, but even I had fallen into the trap of avoiding films in certain genres below certain rating thresholds.
If you have anything other than an “average” taste in movies (spoiler alert: you do!), those averages aren’t even useful for comparing one film against another.
There are a bunch of recommenders out there. The one I built uses the same approach I’ve used for a long time, but it’s had success (has been powering Reddit’s board game recommendation bot for over 5 years now). I put it up for personal and friend use during COVID, but i’ve decided to keep it running for the foreseeable future as a free service to Trakt users. If you want to check it out, you can create some recommendations at couchmoney.tv
Algorithmic recommendations get a bad rap, but this isn’t all that algorithmic - it basically generates recommendations based on the ratings that people with similar tastes to you gave to films. In certain categories for me, it’s been pure gold - routinely recommending films with average ratings of below 7/10 (and even less than 5/10) that I absolutely love.
So for me the best rating system is the one that’s based on a group of people who objectively have similar taste in film to me! I don’t know what I would have done during lockdown without it - I went from a pretty low hit rate in many genres (me and my partner have, er, eclectic tastes in horror, thriller, sci-fi and comedy especially) to not even reading ratings anymore and just going with suggestions and getting a much higher hit rate.
Another thing I observed is that pre-reading ratings is pretty much guaranteed to contaminate my objectivity. If I read a film has 4/10, but sounds like something I’ll like, I’ll usually like it - low expectations - vs if I read rave reviews and just think meh, I’ll dislike that film more than if I went in cold. I no longer read ratings or reviews of any kind before watching a film - I may read the trakt plot summary but even that I avoid if the poster looks decent enough.
Anyway hope you all find the movies you love, and if you do try couchmoney feel free to drop me feedback - i’m not here that often but I can always be reached on reddit at u/simiansays.
Oops, sorry for the very late reply! I’m not on here much
Synching and updating is definitely working in general. “Not enough recommendations found” almost always means that the user has not rated enough films in Trakt (usually 10-20 rated films is more than enough to get started). If your friend is still having that problem, please let me know their username so I can look into it.
This weekend I just posted a massive update to the recommendation engine and the recommendations are now even better than before.
Which is not always an easy thing to do. I guess the bottom line is, choosing a movie (as well as watching it) is an emotional experience, therefor it would make sense some of us have trouble. Especially when you consider we now have digital access to almost the entire world’s movie content. Love it, hate it… There doesn’t seem to be a better solution other than to look at ratings (between IMDB and RT)
The only place I can even remotely correlate with my own opinions is if something is <6 on IMDb, it’s (generally) probably not worth watching.
Other than that, everywhere seems to be plagued with spam ratings, and even here I just saw yet another item that’s not even out yet but has a 10% from 1 rating…
If you like parody movies it’s quite entertaining regardless of the low rating. I think the problem is that only certain types of people engage with rating systems and the ratings tend to be weighted to favour movies people feel like they are supposed to like because marketing has told them so, rather than movies they actually enjoy.
and when it comes to movie and TV trailers… I NEVER ever watch the complete trailer. I highly recommend doing this in order for one to complete there own thoughts, opinions and potentially watching that particular movie/ TV show.
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