Netflix Is Ending Reviews July 30th 147
goombah99 writes: Netflix is sending emails to subscribers announcing the end of user-authored reviews on Netflix. Past reviews are being archived. The stated reason is declining usage. This follows on the previous years' decision to remove range voting for user ratings (0 to 5 stars) and substitute a thumbs up/down approval voting system. One suspects that the former is an unintended consequence of the latter, since the purpose of people who write a review is to try to explain the nuances of their decision. An inexpressive rating system defeats that. It can be argued that approval voting has technical advantages in aggregating ratings for a recommendation engine as it doesn't need to normalize the biases in a rating system between different users and mostly heads off gaming the system with exaggerated degrees of rating. But evidently that was also a necessary component of the review process itself regardless of its utility for recommendation engines. The email that Netflix is sending users is short and to the point: "You contributed a review on Netflix within the last year. We wanted to let you know that this feature will be retired on July 30th due to declining usage. We appreciate you taking time to write a review. All of your reviews will be available at netflix.com/reviews through July 30th."
So their ratings are now going to become as... (Score:4, Insightful)
useless as amazon.com reviews. Thanks for the warning.
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Amazon reviews are far more useful than thumbs up/down -- the gold is in mining the reviews via the review search box which is, strangely, only available on desktops AFAIK. The star ratings are only useful to a certain degree -- there's too many dimensions to even the simplest products to fold down to a star rating that matches an individual's tastes, but it still helps rule out definite lemons. The real problem I have with Amazon reviews is when different models are merged into one item, and that makes it
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Just an FYI on this, you can get a list of reviews only for the actual product instead of the whole group. If you're viewing all the reviews there will be a drop down that contains only "All types" (default selection) and the type you had selected. You'll often be disappointed to find no reviews at all for that particular product though when you select it, which I believe is the scummy reason they group them in the first place...to get a (in this case fake) base of reviews going for a product.
AFAIK this doe
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I'm about to have a book published. I guess I'll get to find out if my publisher is more or less slimy than Addison-Wesley.
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Why get a publisher? It's trivial to contract out most of the rest of it and you get to keep a larger slice of the money. It's not like in olden times when you needed a publisher in order to get a book in front of customers.
I wasn't writing my book for money. I was writing it to educate people and lay out the correct way of thinking about a particular technical topic. When I agreed to sign up with a publisher who was pestering me to let them, it was because it meant I didn't have to go to the trouble of getting books made, copy editing, dealing with distributors, getting ISBNs and all the rest.
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You don't have to ignore all reviews. You can choose to read 1-star and 2-star reviews and weight them accordingly. Amazon reviews are just like any other advertisements or product reviews; everyone lies and everyone has their own agenda, but that doesn't mean you can't still glean some information from the story that other people are trying to spin.
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Some people like bad movies (Score:3)
My wife complains that my suggested watchlist is populated by cheesy low-budget science fiction... This makes sense, because I keep watchi
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I didn't even know that there were Netflix reviews. All I see is thumbs-up vs thumbs-down vs do nothing. No ability to write text.
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If you're only using the Netflix app on a mobile device the user reviews aren't accessible. Try logging into your Netflix account using the web interface.
About half my Netflix viewing is on my desktop computer so the reviews are a nice way to get a sense if a show is crap or not. The thumbs up/down really doesn't give an accurate take on things at least from a viewers point of view. There's no context. I really miss the five-star ratings and will miss the user reviews when they get killed off. It's a shame
Re: So their ratings are now going to become as... (Score:1)
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Don't you mean the question/answer section:
I don't know how useful the reviews are, but I bought the blue one for a christmas present for my great god nephew and it smells great. -cluelesspawn
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Re: So their ratings are now going to become as... (Score:2)
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You posted in another thread about Westworld didn't you?
I say that because the same person in that thread was also using the term disgusting when referring to black females characters...
Better DVD rental service? (Score:2)
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There's a large section of filmography that's just completely un-rentable these days.
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The broken and scratched discs was a top reason as to why we left. After sending back one movie twice to get a working copy, I lost interested in what I was trying to watch. I noted that based on how many we watched in a month, I could just buy discs for about the same amount of money since getting anything recent was almost impossible.
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You're supposed to burn the movies and mail them back the same day or next day.
That's how you make the DVD service viable financially, you get to watch them on your own time and still pile up the correct number of DVDs per month for your dollar.
1 star, didn't watch (Score:3)
dumped them already. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a company who provided a very useful service one. Had lots of content I was interested in seeing.
Now-day's they self produce stuff I'm mostly not interested in and have removed many things I'd like to watch.
They have basically been ignoring the core of what made them attractive to users like me ( lots of old and some new content cheap). In favor of other business, but I apparently am not a member of the demographic they are marketing too.
So, I dumped them and went on the greener pastures. Lot's of other options out there.
Re:dumped them already. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:dumped them already. (Score:4, Insightful)
I do blame Netflix for not prioritizing their DVD service enough—the only aspect of their business that wasn't beholden to entrenched content producers. The first time I cancelled my Netflix subscription was when they didn't let me just keep DVD service and opt out of the streaming thing that didn't work on my Linux box anyway (at the time). The second time I cancelled my Netflix subscription is because their streaming selection is crap (even though Netflix is not to blame here). I realize they spun off DVD.com, but I've been turned off so many times by Netflix now, that I'd rather stream what remains available on Amazon Prime than keep going back and forth with Netflix.
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Re: dumped them already. (Score:2)
You are of course correct, but if it were up to me they would take the money they are using for 'original" content and get the rights to a bunch of old site Coms and dramas you can't see anywhere else. Or use it to lobby for shortening copyright I'd support that.
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Re:dumped them already. (Score:5, Informative)
Not a lot of alternatives. Amazon isn't much better, but they do spend a ton of money to be relevant and becoming an exclusive source of some popular shows, but that may not be sustainable. Everything I would be interested in seems to have an additionsl cost. I don't think Amazon would exist if it weren't for the pre-existing "Prime" userbase. Hulu has it's own major issues. Those are essentially the only effective subscription streaming services with a broad based appeal.
The biggest problem with Netflix isn't something they can control - they don't have access to content customers may want. It's like the old cable wars but with streaming services instead (ie, withhold your entire content and demand more money). So no, Netflix is not voluntarily dumping half of the shows just so that it can add it's own programming, instead it is adding it's own programming to make up for losing access to so much content.
The only thing I'm missing out on with Netflix is Doctor Who, and a few movies, and it's not their fault for that. I don't watch enough TV or movies that I can ever run out of stuff on Netflix.
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Ditto. I subscribed again last month and have just cancelled it again. I didn’t find it interesting. Tried to watch some science style programs but it was crap presented by (semi) celebrities, dumbed massively down and wrapped in fancy graphics. Felt so old school. And all the old shows I would watch for fun and nostalgia are gone.
I am back just to watching YouTube.
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Movies show up on Netflix streaming around the same time they come out on DVD.
You looked at trailers, probably for new movies. Such will not be on Netflix, or at the library, or for purchase at Amazon. That is what run-down movie theaters are for.
Well, that's because they are crappy. (Score:1)
2 ratings instead of 5 is a little less arbitrary. (Score:4, Interesting)
Now instead of everyone deciding for themselves what two or four stars means, people can just decide whether they liked the movie or not. It's simple. I like that.
The next step is some kind of contextual ranking. It could be as simple as "I liked this movie ( ) more than ( ) less than [insert last movie seen here]". Then Netflix could use the Condorcet Method to rank all movies in order from worst to best, and assign each movie a percentile ranking based on its position in the list. Now instead of ranking clustered around the 1-star and 5-star mark, we would see a flat distribution that adds resolution at both poles.
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I actually like a lot of movies and shows that aren't very popular, or weren't popular when first run. If we only ever watched popular stuff there'd never be a market for indie films and there'd be no such thing as "cult favorites". If you go by popularity, then McDonald's is the best restaurant in the world. A good review is supposed to help you find something you like.
Re:2 ratings instead of 5 is a little less arbitra (Score:5, Informative)
>"Now instead of everyone deciding for themselves what two or four stars means, people can just decide whether they liked the movie or not. It's simple. I like that."
I *hate* it. Because there are lots of movies I neither like nor despise... and there are movies I like and movies I really, really like. None of that can be expressed with a "like/hate" or "good/bad" 2-point scale. Plus, somehow, Netflix LEARNED what I liked based on realistic ratings (I rate EVERYTHING I watch). Now how are they going to do that? I will have no scale to know how certain they are I will "like" it or "dislike" it.
How hard is it to rate on a 5 point scale? We do it zillions of times a day at nearly every school in the nation...
5 = A = very best = Absolutely love
4 = B = good = Like it
3 = C = average = OK/Meh/mediocre
2 = D = not good = disliked it more than liked it
1 = F = worst/fail = hated it
Now, if it were a 7, 9, or 13 point scale, I can see why it might be more difficult than it is worth, overall. But really, a 5 point scale is the one that most everyone has used for many years throughout a significant part of their lives. Even if the definition of each rating slid a little here and there, it isn't so varying as to be useless.
Getting rid of reviews is yet another hostile move to the way many of us use Netflix to try and decide what to watch and help others.
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Let's say you watched two movies in a row and you really liked both a lot. Under a 5-star system you would rate them both a "5", which means you cannot express through the rating which one you liked more. But instead of a 5-star rating, if you were asked to choose whether you liked the second one more (thumb
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If Bob likes movie "A" more than "B" and Susan likes "B" more than "C", then Condorcet would rank them like this: A > B > C
This can expand to any number of movies. Then someone only has to find a movie in the list that they're thinking about watching and another that they've already watched (perhaps one in the same genre) and look at their
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If Bob likes movie "A" more than "B" and Susan likes "B" more than "C", then Condorcet would rank them like this: A > B > C
If you think movie quality is one dimensional, you have never understood any movie in your life.
deciding whether it's a 3- or 4-star movie while trying to be consistent with the way you've voted on other movies in the past. Too much effort!
If, for a long time, bad movies of a particular genre X were being made available - there might be many consistent watchers of that genre that would very likely rate a following mediocre movie highly. Since they are consistent watchers of the genre X - they are likely to have rated movies of genre Y with thumbs down. Now if a multi-genre viewer sees the rating created in such an environment - he would very likely
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>"Let's say you watched two movies in a row and you really liked both a lot. Under a 5-star system you would rate them both a "5", which means you cannot express through the rating which one you liked more."
But nobody has watched only two movies before. Most people will think about all the hundreds or even thousands of movies they have seen and try to rate it based on that knowledge. In your example, I would rate both based on what I have SEEN before, not just those two in isolation or against only eac
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Let's say you watched two movies in a row and you really liked both a lot. Under a 5-star system you would rate them both a "5", which means you cannot express through the rating which one you liked more. But instead of a 5-star rating, if you were asked to choose whether you liked the second one more (thumbs up) or less (thumbs down) than the first movie, you could provide that missing information.
This only works if the two movies you saw in a row where in the same genre (and other factors - for example some movies are more fun watching with a crowd.)
How could I honestly compare a gritty depressing drama or action comedy?
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How hard is it to rate on a 5 point scale? We do it zillions of times a day at nearly every school in the nation...
5 = A = very best = Absolutely love
1 = F = worst/fail = hated it
Apparently it's hard. Let me direct your attention to this partial article: You Graduated Cum Laude? So Did Everyone Else [wsj.com]. At X and Y, more got the designations than didn't.
So just save time and space and make everything a 10 [imdb.com] or 11 [youtu.be] and be done with it.
Re:2 ratings instead of 5 is a little less arbitra (Score:4, Insightful)
How hard is it to rate on a 5 point scale?
Incredibly. Just becaues you found a logical example of how it works doesn't mean anyone actually does it like that. There's been many studies into biases and tendencies in reviewing systems, how they relate to psychology, how they relate to the reviewer's gender, how they relate to the impact of what they are reviewing.
Let's talk about 5 point scales:
Mobile apps:
5 = It works.
4 = It works but I want a feature it doesn't have.
3 = I clicked by accident.
2 = I clicked by accident.
1 = Anything from it formatted the phone and sent my dickpicks to my grandma, to there was a misspelling in the man page, to I don't like the colour of the okay button.
Service Staff:
5 = Did their job
4 = Should be fired.
3 = Should be fired.
2 = Should be fired.
1 = You guys are idiots why did you ever hire a person like this in the first place.
On a 5 point scale in many review systems the defaults tend to the extremes with any deviation from the default moving to the other extreme. People in general don't cope with a 5 point or even a 3 point scale. It is an incredibly useless way of getting generic feedback without moderating that feedback with additional data.
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Perhaps all they need to do is offer a better definition of the scale to those rating it...
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It doesn't change human nature. Even when the definitions are given studies have shown that there will be inherent bias in the results for all sorts of reasons unrelated to the content.
E.g. service staff example (just one example of bias): You can give the scale. You can follow it religiously and without empathy. The next person will come along and think, "Yes the service was horrible but I don't want the poor guy to lose his job, I'll give him a 5".
That's the kind of thinking that goes on both conciously a
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But if that kind of extreme bias is the problem, then a two-point scale of "like" and "dislike" is just as useless. It would better to find a way to filter out useless ratings or a reasonable scale (like 5 points)... not so hard for Netflix, for example, since they are known/logged in people. If their ratings are nothing but 1 and 5, or unrealistically positive or negative, or never enough ratings, then limit the usefulness of their ratings when applied to other people (the group value). For the customer
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But if that kind of extreme bias is the problem, then a two-point scale of "like" and "dislike" is just as useless.
Not at all. It's a completely different kind of useless. That's the problem with survey based studies. They are all flawed in different ways. The yes / no system resolves a whole series of flaws and biases while introducing a whole different set.
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Agreed. And in those cases, it should be pretty easy for an algorithm to spot the useless nature or trend of that person's ratings and prevent those from contaminating the overall rating (at least in cases like Netflix, where the rater is known and has a history).
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5 = almost perfect / one of the best movies of all time / give me more like this / would not watch again
4 = liked / would recommend / give me more like this / would not watch again
3 = passed the time / don't care/ would not watch again
2 = disliked / give me less like this / would not watch again
1 = hated / never give me crap like this / would not watch again
How about a usable UI? (Score:3, Insightful)
How about adding a usable UI? I use the streaming website and it's so goddamn slow and bloated. Get rid of all of the Web 2.0 JavaScript bullshit, please! The listing of the shows is awful, too. The title only appears in the show's pictures. It takes way too much effort to find the title text within the image, to ignore any stupud effects and stylings, and to them figure out what the show actually is. All I want is a plain list of links with the show title as the text. There should also be a button to filter out any Bollywood shows. I never want to watch any of that junk.
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I only watch it from my Roku, and the interface is pretty straight forward. Much better than Hulu or Amazon.
This is all part of their grand master plan. (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe this is all part of their grand plan to mitigate their large loss of third-party content which started several years ago.
They redesigned their website to be more graphical and less text based several years ago, making it hard to simply sort highly rate titles and scan though them quickly. I thought this was so that the user could not tell how limited their third party movie content was.
Then they introduced their "thumbs up/down" rating system supposedly because their users did not understand how their 5 star rating system was being used differently than the convention that the rest of the world follows. At that time, they also moved the reviews for each show to a separate (last) tab under each show's view.
This latest change completes the transformation. You can now only see what shows Netflix wants you to see unless you do a direct text search. No more sorting and no more reading reviews.
Personally, I am amazed that this is working for them, but I appear to be in the minority. Prior to their website redesign, I was a strong proponent of their service. After the redesign, I was convinced that they would tank and sold my stock in their company. However, their stock price has only gone up from there.
Re:This is all part of their grand master plan. (Score:5, Interesting)
>"Personally, I am amazed that this is working for them, but I appear to be in the minority"
+1 to your post and add me to your "minority." I saw all the changes you listed and thought exactly the same things. At least on the DVD site I had some control, on the streaming site, it is a wasteland of annoying scroll bars that tell me almost nothing about what I might want to watch or what is available. No real sorting, no real consideration about my ratings or those of others, no way to really see what is ACTUALLY new. It is beyond frustrating.
I, too, am convinced they are doing all this to:
1) Hide or remove tools from users to keep them "engaged"
2) Make it look like they have more content than they do
3) "Guide" people into accepting what they do have
4) Censor feedback that might lower watching what they do have
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Their new interface is pretty terrible.
I can't figure out how to find new shows that I'd like. It's claimed they produced 1000 hours of original content last year. I can't find most of it, apparently. They just recommend the same few shows over and over again. They've been sending email about recently added shows they think I'll like, but they have been so far off base of late. More like "here's a show we know you'll never watch but we paid heavily for it, so please?"
I'm burned out on Marvel shows, since al
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You can't possibly be amazed they're getting away with this. Netflix is no longer the young lovable new puppy. It's an old established dog of a corporation that too many people simply live with (and, largely, they enjoy simply flipping on the tube and watching whatever is on). Baby Boomers have a netflix button on their TV remote. Their stock price in this case isn't how happy the users are, it's how profitable and powerful the company is. This is a move that makes them more powerful at the expense of cus
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The 5 star and up/down ratings are intended to help Netflix learn what shows you like, not necessarily what are good or bad shows in general. Not that Netflix is any good at this, but that was the intent. (Because you watched Wolverine, Netflix recommends Animal House)
I've never seen a review on Netflix, ever. Is this something on the PC (which I don't use)? I would like to see reviews, by users or professionals, attached to the shows and visible. I don't really care who the actors or directors are so
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Reviews have always been available through the web UI, though they've been well hidden for years, thus the "decline in usage". Yeah, Netflix, hide it well enough and people won't use it. Well done.
I can't stand and can't use non-web UIs for watching TV. How do you even search for a title you want to watch? Some stupid on-screen keyboard with about 10 clicks on the remote per letter? And you can't even seek instantly to a specific position in what you're watching. I just don't understand the non-web wa
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Well, it's easier to skip to where I want on Roku than it is to get the video to the place I want with youtube on PC. I just use the 3x fast foward, or the skip-back 10 seconds, etc. It doesn't feel much different from other set top boxes I've used in the past. And I'd rather watch TV from my couch on a big screen than at my desk and chair watching my PC.
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Well, it's easier to skip to where I want on Roku than it is to get the video to the place I want with youtube on PC. I just use the 3x fast foward, or the skip-back 10 seconds, etc
Really, that's easier than clicking in the right place on the bar?
And I'd rather watch TV from my couch on a big screen than at my desk and chair watching my PC.
Non-sequitur. I watch TV from my couch on a big screen, and use a web ui with mouse (and occasionally keyboard to search). The TV is just the monitor for my laptop. Easier for streaming and for playing media files.
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They want to hide the part where people say they don't like the things we're told we're supposed to like.
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Counter-point here...
I care for a client and as part of that we both watch a lot of TV. Actually a lot of streaming, via Roku.
The interface works just fine. We have tons of content to watch. There was a "bigger pictures" upgrade recently that is not my personal cup of tea, but ultimately the way it works (when you highlight it) is to take over most of the screen with that one product's teaser.
Since we are just trying to choose what to watch next, an expanded screen is not a bad thing.
This guy probably wa
what went wrong? (Score:1)
Why are the reviews for all of the big streaming services, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu so utterly useless? They have no relationship to whether or not I will enjoy something or even whether it's any good or not.
At the same time, with a little bit of judicious discernment, reviews for products on the Amazon site itself, or on Steam, are still very useful (especially when combined with the "questions and answers" on Amazon or the discussion threads on Steam.
They should be able to do better. When Spotify or Pandor
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Watch it? We're living it.
quo vadis Netflix? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Heck, remember when they had user-made lists? That was awesome in the early days, before streaming. Some movie you liked would be on some weird list by some criteria you'd never have thought of, and you'd discover a half-dozen new cool movies. Good times, before "designers" ruined everything.
They broke the reviews then claim no one uses them (Score:2, Offtopic)
Netflix had entered the big time, landing a special from Amy Schumer that was going to open the door for them to millions more customers, the way Howard Stern did for Sirius. But then...it wasn't very good.
There was their big star - fresh, uncensored, and squeezed into a scandalous leather leather outfit. It was going to be epic! Glitz, glamour, buzz...but then the material was flat. On top of that, she used the special as a platform to demonize gun owners, who never take lightly the suggestion that the
Control (Score:5, Insightful)
"It was cool when you were rating other people's stuff. But now that we're making our own content, we really don't appreciate you saying it's all junk."
On an even more cynical level, they simply want to control what you watch.
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Right. If 90% of their customers just watch the top 10 shows, that's only 10 shows they need to push to their CDN. They don't even need to pay the IP holders money. On the flip side, if everyone watches a random sampling of shows, their CDN has to move a ton of data. If a third-party show gets popular, that means they'll negotiate for more from Netflix next season.
Controlling what people watch simply makes them money.
That you simply cannot unsubscribe from! The GALL!
Ease up with the sarcasm, I've already canceled. And yeah, all their shows are bundle
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... They don't even need to pay the IP holders money. ... If a third-party show gets popular, that means they'll negotiate for more from Netflix next season.
Controlling what people watch simply makes them money.
Actually one of the standard complaints from third party IP providers is that Netflix refuses to provide them with ratings, viewer counts, or any other hard data to help them in negotiations. My understanding of the standard contract is that Netflix pays a set amount for the time period, if nobody watches it or everybody watches it this amount doesn't change.
The Linuxization of Media Streaming? (Score:2)
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Complete loss of core values (Score:5, Insightful)
Netflix was popularized on their ability to innovate and deliver a targeted experience. It was so important to them that they used to sponsor a million dollar prize to anyone who could improve upon their ability to match content to users.
Two things happened simultaneously that changed this:
1) They started making their own content; some of which is good but most of which is shit.
and
2) They started losing good content from 3rd parties, leaving them with mostly shit.
A good, balanced ratings system doesn't exactly work in an environment where you have very little of value to offer and you want to prioritize your own garbage besides. Netflix has had to absolutely gut and now flush one of the core innovations that built them into the juggernaut they are today; they are fast becoming just another new media studio. HBO is their competitor now. I yearn for the Netflix catalog of yore.
Problem is I'm not sure who fucked up here.
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Any site whose goal is to keep you 'engaged' has no respect for you or your time. The content they have or don't have shouldn't be a determining factor of how they treat their subscribers. This is the same thing that has ruined tech for me in general. The decisions are now made by marketing and MBAs instead of engineers. I used to love Netflix, at this point I barely tolerate them.
Strangely enough the problem is Congress. (Score:1)
From the invention of movies through the 1940's Hollywood operated on the "Studio System". Under this system the studios which made the movies and the theaters which showed the movies were owned by the same corporations. Thus the studios were guarantied distribution of their movies; but movie goers could only see the movies of the studios that had theaters in their area; and independent theaters and studios were out of luck.
In the '50s Congress decided these monopolies were bad and forced the corporations
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Even More Difficult to Discen What to Watch (Score:2)
I watch stuff on Netflix. A lot. It's easily my biggest bandwidth hog. But my problem is that I don't watch that many new things simply because it's only gotten more and more difficult to find things I know I want to watch. That doesn't mean there's less content that I would likely enjoy. I mean that compared to when Netflix started its streaming service, it's only gotten consistently more difficult to search for films and series based on my self-determined tastes.
You used to be able to search by language,
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It's difficult because completely unrelated stuff comes up under whatever genre you're searching. Amazon's the same.
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Too many (Score:1)
Was already done (Score:2)
Ever since NetFlix decided to put a thumbs-up/thumb-down rating system on top of their own 1-5 stars system, the reviews have been buried.
You have to really fuss with the site to get at the reviews and still lingering 1-5 star system buried beneath the forward facing thumb-up/down.
So yeah, nothing really is changing except instead of hard to find the reviews, they'll be harder to find and no longer added to.
Which is fine really, most people I think consult other review sites (Rotten Tomatoes?) rather than N
IMDB has done something similar (Score:2)
Their review page now displays just a star number instead of a graphical representation of the rating, and it's now harder to see the well-written critical reviews. My guess is that they were paid to do so, which is in line with the increasing reliance on formulaic, nearly unwatchable crap that's being pushed out by hollywood today.
I didn't know it was possible to review (Score:2)
I've been on Netflix for a few months and never imagined they have a review system.
No spell for4ecting here (Score:2)
this feature will be retired on July 30th due to declining usage
It's declining in usage because you're hiding reviews and making them hard to find!
You're making them hard to find because the tendency of people to bitch rather than praise makes people not watch many offerings, your internal numbers show.
This hurts subscription maintenance as people feel they are getting less out of it once they've watched the good stuff.
Ergo reviews have to go.
They don't listen anyway (Score:1)
Ever tried to get REAL tech support out of them? You can't find it
Netflix is Ending Reviews July 30th (Score:1)
A LOT of those reviews were just nutters ranting (Score:2)
The REAL reason... (Score:1)
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