I'm actually very disappointed by this. In almost any case, I prefer a 5-star system over a binary thumbs up/down. A more detailed rating system allows me to differentiate my absolute favorites from content I thought was merely interesting. It also helps me to do pairwise comparisons of different titles. If my only option for saying I like something is "thumbs up", then I lose a significant amount of information about which titles I like more.

I'm not sure I agree with this decision. People have different tastes and when looking at stars I would say anything between 3 and 5 is a good indication that it might be worth checking out.

If you limit that to just thumbs up or thumbs down whatever gets the most votes is what its going to rate. There is no "partial thumb" option to know if its neutral

This makes sense.

I see two problems with stars:

1. they force you to think: should it be 5, 3, 4? Too many options.

2. people use stars in different ways: I have seen many reviews that read "best product even", with 4 stars instead of 5. Some people "save" 5 stars for something really out-of-the-ordinary good, while others give 5 stars more easily (me)

I agree and disagree. Option paralysis on movies is real - It does introduce friction to think about how you felt about the movie. I think that's time well spent for netflix users. I, personally, like to think about and re-enjoy my favorite moments from movies, and coming up with a rating encourages me to do that.

The second problem is controllable. Ultimately, Netflix is learning my rating habits, and can pick people who have similar sets of ratings. They don't need to know whether "Ernest Saves Christmas" is a better movie than "The Godfather", they just need to find other people who've rated them 5 and 4 stars respectively and figure out based on their ratings what I'd think of "A Series of Unfortunate Events".

There's a second aspect: They can figure out from the distribution of stars that you've given whether you're a binary rater (all 1 and 5), one who uses the full scale (a mixture of each), have a critical bent (more 3s, than 4s or 2s than 1s or 5s), or simply tasteless (see above). They can leverage that into the averages - Weight the ratings based on who's using what rating. A thousand people hitting 5 star who're all habitual 5-and-1 raters might do less to move a movie's rating than one critic rating a 4. And that's okay.

That makes sense. I guess ratings are important to Netflix enough that they could invest in that.

Thumbs up/down is definitely easier, though, and don't take away any satisfaction from rating IMO.

Yep. I've seen many people treat the stars as a binary system. 5 stars if it's good, 1 star if it's bad. That includes me. I'm not a critic, and I don't watch a ton of TV.

I remember when digital music first came out, I tried to rate my songs. I eventually realized that I should really just delete anything that I don't consider great. I did this even with stuff I paid for or maybe used to like. It naturally leads to a much more enjoyable library of content where pretty much everything is worth your time.

I'm sure I'll enjoy this as much as I enjoy the autoplay previews they won't let us disable.

It's okay, I'll just have to use rotten tomato and google to find which shows are worth watching.

[XKCD#1098](https://xkcd.com/1098/)