4 ms·

If something has 1000 ratings but is only 3.5 stars whereas something with 1 rating and 5 stars, what does that say about the average? Not much. It just says

by mmuro 14y ago

If something has 1000 ratings but is only 3.5 stars whereas something with 1 rating and 5 stars, what does that say about the average? Not much. It just says there's more people to rate something and have an opinion about it. Getting people to rate something is difficult in and of itself and only the people who are on the love/hate spectrum will rate something. I like the histograms as it reveals a little into the rating. After all, if a single person gave it 1 star and everyone else rated it 3 or more, the average is likely skewed because of that one person who is clearly "gaming" the system because they weren't happy. I think ratings should take into account intent. If multiple people are rating it 1 star, then clearly it should be weighted downward. However, if a single person out of 100 people gave it 1 star, I don't think the average should be weighted evenly. It's a difficult problem to solve and XKCD is just making a joke.

slantyyz 14y ago
"Trustworthiness" of the reviewer is always difficult, especially with movie reviews, because there's never any accounting for taste. I find it hard to rely on aggregated ratings for that reason. When it came to picking movies to watch, I used to love watching Siskel and Ebert, because I knew their tastes. If only Siskel (whose tastes were more like mine than Ebert's) gave a thumbs up, I knew there was a pretty good chance I'd at least think the movie was "ok". On the other hand, I'd be less likely to give a movie a chance if only Ebert gave a thumbs up. These days, what I have to do is go to Rotten Tomatoes and take a sampling of four or five reviewers that I trust/like (which actually includes Roger Ebert and a few of the people he used to have as guest reviewers on Ebert & Roeper) and base my decision on that.
- jfb 14y ago
  Human curation is still the state of the art; computed curation is a miserable failure that utterly fails to capture my tastes. It's trivially easy to guess what iTunes or Netflix will recommend to me, which indicates to me that the decision taken is tautological. The goal of a recommendation system should be to expose me to things I wouldn't be likely to find by myself.

by mmuro 14y ago

slantyyz 14y ago

"Trustworthiness" of the reviewer is always difficult, especially with movie reviews, because there's never any accounting for taste. I find it hard to rely on aggregated ratings for that reason. When it came to picking movies to watch, I used to love watching Siskel and Ebert, because I knew their tastes. If only Siskel (whose tastes were more like mine than Ebert's) gave a thumbs up, I knew there was a pretty good chance I'd at least think the movie was "ok". On the other hand, I'd be less likely to give a movie a chance if only Ebert gave a thumbs up. These days, what I have to do is go to Rotten Tomatoes and take a sampling of four or five reviewers that I trust/like (which actually includes Roger Ebert and a few of the people he used to have as guest reviewers on Ebert & Roeper) and base my decision on that.

jfb 14y ago
Human curation is still the state of the art; computed curation is a miserable failure that utterly fails to capture my tastes. It's trivially easy to guess what iTunes or Netflix will recommend to me, which indicates to me that the decision taken is tautological. The goal of a recommendation system should be to expose me to things I wouldn't be likely to find by myself.