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Terrible article. Calling histograms awful, based on nothing more than an opinion. Then trying to conclude that some convoluted scatter plot system makes more

Terrible article. Calling histograms awful, based on nothing more than an opinion. Then trying to conclude that some convoluted scatter plot system makes more sense is laughable. Not to mention, this system is still just a star rating system. This would be no different than having two histograms side by side.. assuming, of course, that you'd even want to rate different aspects of the same thing. I can't even imagine scatter plots on amazon, or trying to convince the general public that "it makes more sense"

geelen 14y ago
My point was you can't create a scatter plot from a single dimension of data, and that histograms are awful because they don't allow you to see patterns. But of course you're right, it is just my opinion.
- sixbrx 14y ago
  But histograms do allow you to easily see one of the most important patterns to me, at least for technical books, which is that the book is excellent but too "hard" for some who aren't willing to put in the effort. Those books tend to have a lot of 5 star and 1 star ratings, with few in between. Check out the SICP reviews on Amazon for example. When augmented with a set of comments, it's usually easy to predict which of the two groups I'd be in.
  - droithomme 14y ago
    I find histograms very useful on amazon. Particularly the bimodal ones, which typically indicate controversial material.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  You should consider throwing up some histogram pairs of the data shown on the scatter plots. It looks like they would still give a good picture of the data, as the trends are mostly linear.
vhf 14y ago
This would be no different than having two histograms side by side.. Yes it would, and the article shows why and how. Scatter plots are easy to read (for comp./math. educated people). Two histograms side by side are easy to read (and find correlations) for nobody.
- abrookewood 14y ago
  I'm with Henry ... the scatterplot is fundamentally no different to two histograms side-by-side (though it is marginally easier to read).
  - dbecker 14y ago
    Though a scatterplot conveys less information (e.g. the correlations between the two axes), I think it takes longer to process. It also takes more screen real estate than a pair of histograms.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      >Though a scatterplot conveys less information A scatterplot conveys objectively more information.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    A scatter plot definitely shows more information than a pair of histograms. Who knows if that additional information will be useful. It would be nice if the article actually compared different visualizations of the same data, rather than showing histograms of 2 separate data sets and scatter plots of a 3rd data set.
  - droithomme 14y ago
    > the scatterplot is fundamentally no different Actually it is fundamentally different as the histograms show aggregate data and scatterplots show individual data points.
- qxcv 14y ago
  The point is that scatter plots are harder to read than histograms. It's not two histograms vs. one scatter plot, it's replacing the current single histogram system with a single scatter plot. Also, side-by-side histograms aren't the only way to display two parameters in a single histogram. What about stacked histograms? They scale up to an arbitrary number of parameters and everybody who can read a histogram can read a stacked histogram. Scatter plots seem like thermonuclear overkill for a problem which most movie sites seem to consider to be "solved".
waterlesscloud 14y ago
There's a pretty clear correlation between the histograms and the scatterplots, too, if you look. If you gave someone those 3 histograms and those 3 scatterplots, I bet they could match them up correctly. Aside- The scatterplots are an awful user interface because of the cognitive effort to interpret them, but perhaps there's a way to present the same information in a usable way.
- vhf 14y ago
  Please show me any diagram that does not require cognitive effort to interpret.
sp332 14y ago
It's different from having 2 histograms because it lets you distinguish people who thought it was a good movie but not re-watchable, from people who thought it was a good movie and fairly re-watchable, from people who thought it was an OK movie and not re-watchable. With a bunch of histograms you can't correlate the variables.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  Why would I care about rewatchability? The torrents are full with thousands of lives on video I'll never watch, what's the point of rewatching anything but the dearest, youth-defining films?
  - sp332 14y ago
    The comment I was replying to said This would be no different than having two histograms side by side. And I pointed out that it is not. Oh well I'll answer your question anyway. Because 90% of everything is crap (probably more than that on P2P sites). Re-watching a movie can be like walking in the same park more than once, looking at pleasant things with a sense of recognition. You could put a movie in to suit your mood. Sometimes you'd rather watch a good "original" movie again than watch yet another crappy remake or rip-off.
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      If I have already seen this movie why would I need ratings of any kind?
      - sp332 14y ago
        What use case are you referring to? I don't know anyone who uses ratings sites after seeing a movie.
        guard-of-terra 14y ago
        My point exactly. And why would you care about rewatchability if you didn't see the movie once?
DanBC 14y ago
Possibly correct but a bit grumpily put.
todd3834 14y ago
Terrible comment. I found the article interesting. As someone who has played around with many different types of rating systems, I applaud their effort at trying something different. Sounds like you area little too emotionally invested in histograms. I'm not even going to ask why.
- ajscherer 14y ago
  I'll meet you halfway. It's a terrible comment about a terrible article. I agree that it's laudable to try to invent an improved version of online ratings, but this article wasn't effective in convicing me that they've succeeded. Their argument that historgrams are just.awful. (I didn't care for the extra periods) seems to have two components: 1. asserting that historgrams are bad 2. showing us 3 histograms and saying they tell you the same thing about all 3 movies, when in fact there is a very clear and important difference between the histograms. Its completely obvious from inspection ("people are really good at seeing patterns") that Starship Troopers has a much lower percentage of 5 star ratings than the other two, and a much higher fraction of 0 star ratings. It also appears to me that the Fifth Element has a higher fraction of 4 or 5 star ratings, and is probably the most apprciated of the 3 films, although Blade Runner is fairly close. If you are going to cherry a set of 3 specific films to make your point, you should be sure to at least pick 3 films that support your point instead of refuting it. We then learn about their hypothesis that while 5-star rating system sucks, a system that relies on two correlated 5-star ratings is great. They demonstrate this by using the two question system to draw the exact same conclusion I drew from the histograms of the 1 question ratings. I would've liked some sort of objective attempt to compare the two rating systems. Perhaps it would be possible to measure how frequently the two question system leads people to make a better choice than the one question system, or at least some sort of statistical wonkery that would purport to show me that the two question system in practice draws more distinctions than the one question system. Unfortunatley we only get this one rather uninspired example ("watch this if you’re in the mood for something really good"). They also didn't address why "would you re-watch this film" is a better choice than any other second question. There are attempts to justify it being a good question, but no real evidence that other questions were tried and didn't perform. Finally, the thing that really irked me was that this proposed system doesn't seem to do anything to address most of the actual problems with the regular 5 star system, namely that people who feel really strongly about something are more likely to rate so that most ratings tend towards the extremes, and that without context we have no idea why someone rated something a 5 instead of a 1. Those problems now exist along two dimensions instead of one. I see this less as an article and more as an advertisement hitching a ride on an xkcd comic.
zimbatm 14y ago
I agree, the good idea was to add more than one dimension to the rating. I suspect that it would be even more interesting if we had a couple more ratings to separate that one number into more precise groups.
brown9-2 14y ago
It seems to me like "rewatchability" isn't really a useful metric when I am looking for a new-to-me movie to watch. And when I am looking at user rankings for a movie, almost by definition I am only concerned with rankings for movies I haven't yet seen, since I already have an internal self-ranking for a movie I've seen already. Histograms are extremely useful for knowing the spread of rankings, which the scatter plot also illuminates.
tsahyt 14y ago
It's not a terrible article at all. It's a suboptimal solution but the article is pointing out what's wrong with 5-star rating systems. It's labelled as a "response", not as a solution to all our earthly rating problems.

geelen 14y ago

My point was you can't create a scatter plot from a single dimension of data, and that histograms are awful because they don't allow you to see patterns. But of course you're right, it is just my opinion.

sixbrx 14y ago
But histograms do allow you to easily see one of the most important patterns to me, at least for technical books, which is that the book is excellent but too "hard" for some who aren't willing to put in the effort. Those books tend to have a lot of 5 star and 1 star ratings, with few in between. Check out the SICP reviews on Amazon for example. When augmented with a set of comments, it's usually easy to predict which of the two groups I'd be in.
- droithomme 14y ago
  I find histograms very useful on amazon. Particularly the bimodal ones, which typically indicate controversial material.
maxerickson 14y ago
You should consider throwing up some histogram pairs of the data shown on the scatter plots. It looks like they would still give a good picture of the data, as the trends are mostly linear.

vhf 14y ago

This would be no different than having two histograms side by side.. Yes it would, and the article shows why and how. Scatter plots are easy to read (for comp./math. educated people). Two histograms side by side are easy to read (and find correlations) for nobody.

abrookewood 14y ago
I'm with Henry ... the scatterplot is fundamentally no different to two histograms side-by-side (though it is marginally easier to read).
- dbecker 14y ago
  Though a scatterplot conveys less information (e.g. the correlations between the two axes), I think it takes longer to process. It also takes more screen real estate than a pair of histograms.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    >Though a scatterplot conveys less information A scatterplot conveys objectively more information.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  A scatter plot definitely shows more information than a pair of histograms. Who knows if that additional information will be useful. It would be nice if the article actually compared different visualizations of the same data, rather than showing histograms of 2 separate data sets and scatter plots of a 3rd data set.
- droithomme 14y ago
  > the scatterplot is fundamentally no different Actually it is fundamentally different as the histograms show aggregate data and scatterplots show individual data points.
qxcv 14y ago
The point is that scatter plots are harder to read than histograms. It's not two histograms vs. one scatter plot, it's replacing the current single histogram system with a single scatter plot. Also, side-by-side histograms aren't the only way to display two parameters in a single histogram. What about stacked histograms? They scale up to an arbitrary number of parameters and everybody who can read a histogram can read a stacked histogram. Scatter plots seem like thermonuclear overkill for a problem which most movie sites seem to consider to be "solved".

waterlesscloud 14y ago

There's a pretty clear correlation between the histograms and the scatterplots, too, if you look. If you gave someone those 3 histograms and those 3 scatterplots, I bet they could match them up correctly. Aside- The scatterplots are an awful user interface because of the cognitive effort to interpret them, but perhaps there's a way to present the same information in a usable way.

vhf 14y ago
Please show me any diagram that does not require cognitive effort to interpret.

sp332 14y ago

It's different from having 2 histograms because it lets you distinguish people who thought it was a good movie but not re-watchable, from people who thought it was a good movie and fairly re-watchable, from people who thought it was an OK movie and not re-watchable. With a bunch of histograms you can't correlate the variables.

guard-of-terra 14y ago
Why would I care about rewatchability? The torrents are full with thousands of lives on video I'll never watch, what's the point of rewatching anything but the dearest, youth-defining films?
- sp332 14y ago
  The comment I was replying to said This would be no different than having two histograms side by side. And I pointed out that it is not. Oh well I'll answer your question anyway. Because 90% of everything is crap (probably more than that on P2P sites). Re-watching a movie can be like walking in the same park more than once, looking at pleasant things with a sense of recognition. You could put a movie in to suit your mood. Sometimes you'd rather watch a good "original" movie again than watch yet another crappy remake or rip-off.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    If I have already seen this movie why would I need ratings of any kind?
    - sp332 14y ago
      What use case are you referring to? I don't know anyone who uses ratings sites after seeing a movie.
      - guard-of-terra 14y ago
        My point exactly. And why would you care about rewatchability if you didn't see the movie once?

DanBC 14y ago

Possibly correct but a bit grumpily put.

todd3834 14y ago

Terrible comment. I found the article interesting. As someone who has played around with many different types of rating systems, I applaud their effort at trying something different. Sounds like you area little too emotionally invested in histograms. I'm not even going to ask why.

ajscherer 14y ago
I'll meet you halfway. It's a terrible comment about a terrible article. I agree that it's laudable to try to invent an improved version of online ratings, but this article wasn't effective in convicing me that they've succeeded. Their argument that historgrams are just.awful. (I didn't care for the extra periods) seems to have two components: 1. asserting that historgrams are bad 2. showing us 3 histograms and saying they tell you the same thing about all 3 movies, when in fact there is a very clear and important difference between the histograms. Its completely obvious from inspection ("people are really good at seeing patterns") that Starship Troopers has a much lower percentage of 5 star ratings than the other two, and a much higher fraction of 0 star ratings. It also appears to me that the Fifth Element has a higher fraction of 4 or 5 star ratings, and is probably the most apprciated of the 3 films, although Blade Runner is fairly close. If you are going to cherry a set of 3 specific films to make your point, you should be sure to at least pick 3 films that support your point instead of refuting it. We then learn about their hypothesis that while 5-star rating system sucks, a system that relies on two correlated 5-star ratings is great. They demonstrate this by using the two question system to draw the exact same conclusion I drew from the histograms of the 1 question ratings. I would've liked some sort of objective attempt to compare the two rating systems. Perhaps it would be possible to measure how frequently the two question system leads people to make a better choice than the one question system, or at least some sort of statistical wonkery that would purport to show me that the two question system in practice draws more distinctions than the one question system. Unfortunatley we only get this one rather uninspired example ("watch this if you’re in the mood for something really good"). They also didn't address why "would you re-watch this film" is a better choice than any other second question. There are attempts to justify it being a good question, but no real evidence that other questions were tried and didn't perform. Finally, the thing that really irked me was that this proposed system doesn't seem to do anything to address most of the actual problems with the regular 5 star system, namely that people who feel really strongly about something are more likely to rate so that most ratings tend towards the extremes, and that without context we have no idea why someone rated something a 5 instead of a 1. Those problems now exist along two dimensions instead of one. I see this less as an article and more as an advertisement hitching a ride on an xkcd comic.

zimbatm 14y ago

I agree, the good idea was to add more than one dimension to the rating. I suspect that it would be even more interesting if we had a couple more ratings to separate that one number into more precise groups.

brown9-2 14y ago

It seems to me like "rewatchability" isn't really a useful metric when I am looking for a new-to-me movie to watch. And when I am looking at user rankings for a movie, almost by definition I am only concerned with rankings for movies I haven't yet seen, since I already have an internal self-ranking for a movie I've seen already. Histograms are extremely useful for knowing the spread of rankings, which the scatter plot also illuminates.

tsahyt 14y ago

It's not a terrible article at all. It's a suboptimal solution but the article is pointing out what's wrong with 5-star rating systems. It's labelled as a "response", not as a solution to all our earthly rating problems.