> but the average rating is a measure of popularity

Not quite? Mulholland drive for example, was widely praised by critics and is remembered fondly by film nerds, but is not in most senses “popular”.

I’m not arguing that ratings are perfect, I largely agree with you; just that they’re a weird measurement and not one largely of popularity.

> Not quite

Goodreads is kind of a weird space which shows that the popular vote is kind of useless. It’s hard to find a good book based on ratings. Everything seems to be either 4+ stars or garbage. The Fault in our Stars probably has a better rating than print copies of Hamlet. Actually, all classics seem to hover around 3.68 stars. Never 2. In fact, I don’t think any books published in the history of the world have a rating less than 3.

Anyways, the language you google in heavily affects recommendations. Searching in general is not a useful way to find anything cool. It’s much better to happen upon a good source of reviews or criticism which align with whatever gets your rocks off and settle for curated entertainment/art.

Classics get lower scores because they have a more differentiated audience. People are made or feel culturally obligated to read them. So the Grapes of Wrath (3.97) has a lower score than Anarch (4.62) the 15th Gaunt's Ghost novel set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. This is because the only people who are likely to read the latter are people likely to enjoy it.

Clearly though, different movies and books server different purposes. Is Schindlers List a better movie than Airplane! Sure, but I'm not going to put on the former when I want a few laughs.

Star ratings have been widely proven to be a total failure. Most people treat them as binary: either something is nice, and gets 5, or is crap, and gets 1. The neutral score for things that are OK tends to be 5, sometimes 4.

This is particularly pronounced whenever there are any consequences attached to the ratings. If you give anything but 5 to your Uber driver, you're risking them losing their job. If you give anything but 5 on an e-commerce platform, the seller may lose a lot of money. 5 being the "neutral" score became normalized.

That reminds me about how in Germany a reference for a job must be positive. So it ends up with a spectrum of "he/she worked here" vs "he/she was REALLY good" (in German).

I've come to the (sad) conclusion that review systems are inaccurate, even when well intended. There was likely a moment during their existence where they were accurate. I would guesstimate this moment is generally before it gained momentum. E.g. early days of IMDB, early days of Amazon, and early days of tbat German law mentioned earlier (I don't know the name).

Since Metacritic is an aggregation of paid and amateur reviewers alike, it might very well be more accurate.

> Most people treat them as binary: either something is nice, and gets 5, or is crap, and gets 1

I really think GoodReads is the exception to this though. When I look through other people’s ratings I frequently see them using the full spectrum.

Furthermore, it’s very common for written reviews to say that a book really deserves some fractional number of stars, but Goodreads forced them to round.

Of course, the average ratings suck anyway...

While I agree with you, it is worth commenting on the idea that a 5 out of 5 Uber ride isn’t quite the same thing as a masterpiece of cinema which someone gives 5 stars to on a platform like Mubi. I always interpreted a perfect Uber ride as clean, safe, no BS. A four star Uber does mean that something was a bit off about the experience whereas a four star movie was still wonderful but not quite earth shattering like A 5 star stone cold classic such as L’Aventura or Battle Royale.

Searching in particular works for me. In the old days, if work B referred to work A, one was unlikely to get it unless one was already familiar with A. These days, it's not uncommon for me, in exploring the space around B, to turn up commentary with enough of a search term that allows me to discover A.

Compare linking via epigraph in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24501978

If you're doing what I do when I do something like that, the problem with that method is that it's extremely time-consuming.

I would argue that it is a very popular film released by a major studio, and directed by one of the most popular directors in history. Mulholland Drive is not a film that only "film buffs" saw. I'm not sure if I've every met anyone who hasn't seen a David Lynch film, and I rarely meet anyone who hasn't enjoyed a David Lynch film. He's a multi-millionaire in high demand that entirely dictates his own work conditions.

We must not travel in the same circles. :-)

Of the people I know who have seen a David Lynch movie, I haven’t met anyone who enjoyed them. Speaking for myself, Mulholland Drive is definitely in the running for worst movie I’ve ever seen.

Count me in your second group. I've seen several David Lynch movies, never enjoyed a single one of them. There's something about his film aesthetic but also about his view of what the world really is that just doesn't sit right with me. When I do see them it's because one or more film nerds I respect has raved about it, and I think I should give it a chance. But ... nope, same film aesthetic, same worldview that I just can't enjoy.

I think "enjoy" is the wrong standard to use for David Lynch.

The worst part about open ratings systems is that the people who choose to rate a movie select themselves. If a million people love a thing, they could be the only million people who love a thing (whereas the OP implicitly thinks of them as the only people who noticed a thing.) And as you say, some things have too large an audience due to marketing. There's got to be some way to offset marketing in ratings by deriving how much was done from the people who chose to rate a thing.

Even worse, a rating could be because the raters were most of the people to notice a thing, but in a negative way. All ratings on the internet about things that center women or racial minorities should be ignored. Because of the overwhelming population of white male (and incel-type right-wing internet subculture) commenters, they can get a hate-boner about a movie or tv show just from the title or subject, network with each other, and then be responsible for an order of magnitude more ratings on the thing than the people who the thing was made for.

I think the best way to find other things you like is to figure out what the authors of the things you like themselves like or have worked on. That stuff is hard to find, though. You can get it from references within the works or from interviews and biographies, but it's nothing that algorithms are extracting yet.

I also find a habit from my old punk rock days to work: find other people who were working in the same place at around the same time. You may actually just like the zeitgeist, but have assigned it entirely to the only authors from that place/time that you've been exposed to.

Critic's reviews I find to be worthless, or at least their text. The ideal critic for me is one that just says "yes" or "no" to a long list of movies. You'll figure out from skimming the list whether that critic is a good critic for you. I often find Ebert's reviews a pleasure to read, but I rarely agree with him about the films themselves. Artistic criticism is generally a writing exercise imo, not anything with an actual relationship to the thing being commented upon. I'd put it 3rd in the ranking of most meaningless journalism, right below sports writing, which is still more meaningful than the ultimate: analysis of the reasons behind today's market movements.