Comment Re:Netflix rating engine sucks (Score 1) 86
When Netflix was just a DVD service, keeping up with the star ratings of movies you had watched wasn't hard. You'd log into the web site to manage your queue anyway and clicking on the ratings was simple.
Now so many people watch things via streaming that it's easy to not do it (and so many STBs make it difficult/awkward to rate anyway). Plus I'd bet that much of the streaming viewing is series where rating kind of falls apart because you might watch a single show for a couple of weeks and you lose opportunities to rate many titles since series have a single rating.
It makes me wonder if the suggestion algorithm ever included the critical quality of the movie or if it just included the user ratings. If critical quality was never a factor, skewing the movie base with bad titles makes it seem less effective, especially to a user who may have already taken into account general critical reviews because they see Netflix just pushing bad direct to video titles.
If users are spending more time watching series, not rating due to streaming changing their interactions with the rating system and the recommendation engine not taking into account movie quality it's even easier to see how recommendations become increasingly useless.