That's always what ratings were. People didn't understand that (as you can see), so they changed it to make it more transparent.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-netflix-replaced-its-5-s...
>Netflix’s star ratings were personalized, and had been from the start. That means when you saw a movie on Netflix rated 4 stars, that didn’t mean the average of all ratings was 4 stars. Instead, it meant that Netflix thought you’d rate the movie 4 stars, based on your habits (and other people's ratings). But many people didn’t get that.
What happened is that the notion changed from "predict a scalar rating" to "predict a binary satisfaction."
As parent poster noted, the effect of this is to push "3 star" and "4 star" acceptable shows to the user, instead of "5 star" great (in the user's view) shows.
Also, in Netflix's defense, users are horribly inconsistent in their expressed ratings (they'll rate a movie based on their personal mood at the time, and they'll binge shows they claim aren't 5 stars while ignoring their 5 star movies)
I remember they stated the reviews would still be available in some form for export.
It's no longer the Netflix of old imo.
This is exactly why they switched from 5 stars to up/down/blank.
At least with Amazon Prime there's a high chance they'll at least find the title one searches for and if I am really motivated I can pay a few bucks to watch it.
Netflix just draws a blank.
That's not to say I haven't watched some entertaining things on Netflix, but they seem much better suited to TV series than movies, and I almost feel like I found decent things to watch inspite of their recommendation system, not because of it.
An ML tool from Netflix? It feels like the last thing I'm likely to use.
Until you log into prime video.
Can’t manage to give me a “continue watching last thing button”. That’s literally the most likely thing I want to watch. Also routinely suggest starting with S02 even though I’ve not watched S01.
Never mind machine learning some common sense would be greatly appreciated
My guess is that whatever rankings they currently produce maximize some internal revenue target and that target' user base is not me or you.
If I watched S01E04 yesterday I want to watch S01E05 today. The interface should be suggesting that PLUS whatever else the ML comes up with in addition, not instead of.
Prime is full of minor irritations like that make me wonder whether Amazon engineers dogfood enough
But the recommendations seem to work perfectly for me - I wonder whether that is the case for the silent majority?
The match % is usually spot on for me, and I've never seen it recommend any titles I've given a thumbs-down to.
Much later, when they switched to simple thumbs up/down, the recommender system was entirely useless to me. (Not merely because of the dumbed-down rating system; the recommendations were genuinely bad.)
For the time in between, I'm not sure if the degradation was gradual, sporadic, or not degraded at all.
I still think recommender engines should always enable some form of user tuning. If it doesn’t, then the recommender is a tool for services to control your behavior rather than the other way around.
Although even before I started listening to Spotify while working etc, it seemed to have run out of things to recommend. My weekly discover playlist would be half things I’d already liked. So...who knows. But I miss the discovery functionality quite a bit.
Nothing really beats the recommendations of a human curator with exquisite taste, and just listening to new music nonstop and plucking out the gems as you go.
It's also easy to theorize about "big media" controlling what I listen to, so I still feel the need to do my own exploring, even when I'm getting recommended good fresh stuff.
Similarly, if I play Blacklist in the background as basically noise, I don’t want to see a bunch of related shows. I guess I could give it a thumbs down but I only do that for actually terrible movies.
Also Spotify and Apple music seem to have okay recommendations
Netflix doesn't show IMDB scores, so I have to check it always independently...it sucks.
That or a ceding of recommendations to marketing. That feels too cynical, but more accurate.
Not a streaming service but Google's Discover news is also very good (probably the best recommendations I have come across).
And while saying that, I appreciate their high level technical staff. These decisions are made by bean counters.
I always assumed those three were human selections, not part of the recommendations.
Like the paid ads on top of your search results.
In my limited experience, they are all dismal and best ignored entirely.
When it was easier to see something plausibly like a real user review, that helped I guess.
Netflix doesn't make money by showing people stuff they don't like.
Netflix’s recommender system is hands down the worst I have ever seen. Every single thing I watch, it suggests The Queen’s Gambit and two other random Netflix productions.
Even if I watch the first of a trilogy (LotR, for example). How can they be so terrible at this?
The categories in the main browsing view are also hysterically arbitrary. It kind of looks like a topic model with back-constructed titles for the topics.
Finally, they replaced the ratings with “% matching”. I guess so they can recommend their subpar productions even if they get low ratings.