I'm an avid moviegoer (50+ theatrical releases a year) and I completely ignore movie reviews (and it's getting this way with Yelp reviews too) because they lack context. What I mean by this is that a thumbs up/down or star rating is useless unless I have some background on the person giving the rating. For example, for someone to give Prometheus 2 stars when they haven't seen any of the Alien movies is different from an avid fan. I'd like to see a list of other movies/genres the reviewer rated, and maybe some basic demographic info before I listen to their opinion. Not sure if you have that worked into your idea yet...

Apropos of nothing, but a few times in my life I've actually gone to the theater to see a movie I knew nothing about. Nothing about the plot, the cast, etc. No trailer. It's a distinct experience, and sometimes highly pleasant. (I say "Heat" this way. Which was cool because the whole beginning of the movie is that long sequence with DeNiro stealing the ambulance, but I had no idea what the movie was, not even genre, and it was fun to try to figure out what was going on :)

Agreed - that is an awesome experience - its happened a few times to me - Cape Fear, Training Day & The Fugitive - all great movies.

Context is definitely missing from most systems and it's one of our key differentiators. Our goal is to handle all those contextual details so you don't have to.

Honestly, though, this idea seems to fall squarely into the 'yeah, I could see myself using that. Maybe' category.

This isn't a huge pain point.

If you take another look at my original post, my point was that I still can't articulate why this is such a huge pain. If it helps to put it in perspective, I abandoned a Nanoengineering phd doing promising work in medical diagnostics because our rating system solves an incredibly painful problem for me and I'm convinced it's a more important contribution to the world.

To make a (hopefully apt) comparison, what pain point did twitter initially solve? Sharing what you had for lunch?

Not to be too adversarial, but what problem was incredibly painful to you? Couldn't choose a movie? Couldn't choose a suitable couples movie?

Medical diagnostics, OTOH, could avoid a painpoint involving death - so that's an easier pitch.

See if you can follow this:

Ratings are a form of feedback.

Feedback helps people learn.

Therefore, if we can build a better rating system that lets people share more and better feedback, then we can speed up learning and improve the flow and evolution of ideas.

Also, this system wasn't designed for movies, it was designed for answers on Quora. Movies are just a better beachhead.

I think part of your problem might be that you are solving a problem that a small group of people have, and only a small group will ever have. Most people just aren't that into movies; they decide to see a movie (or not) based on the trailer; they view movies as a way to kill two hours or a pretty safe date activity. The number of people who really have a significant "pain point" in deciding what movies to see is pretty small and likely always will be.

Feel free to discount my opinion though, I haven't seen a movie in a theater in probably 5 years and basically think movies are a complete waste of time and money.

You're not the droid they're looking for. Since Netflix gave $1 million to random people for improving their recommendation engine a bit, I'd say there's a lot of value to be created here.

It never hurts to think bigger, too. If they do somehow achieve a big advance in selecting movies, it could probably be applied to books and movies too, right?

It's hard to think of a more impactful problem for the entire entertainment industry than better matching of products to consumers.

So movies are a pretty big business. Not as big as people usually think, compared to energy, food, defense. But pretty big. Culturally, people go to the movies as a form of escapism, because story-telling seems to be a deeply ingrained human need (I don't think there is a single culture we know about that doesn't tell stories). Some of these stories are quite inspirational: they inspire thought, debate, criticism, self-reflection, etc. And some of us, the ones that are inclined to, write reviews. I've written one or two myself. Occasionally conversations get started around movies with friends - arguments about the meaning of Being John Malkovich or why they only made one Highlander movie....

Listening to stories (or watching them, as the case may be) is a usually enjoyable experience - which is why we choose to listen and even pay for the opportunity to listen to a really good story from a really good storyteller. All of the "pain points" around this process have been thoroughly addressed: it's easy to discover movies, buy tickets, download to your computer, get reviews, write reviews. Even the watching experience itself has been improved with 3D (although this is open to debate) and better sound, even things like IMAX and more experimental experiences e.g. Star Tours at Disneyland. There are some places in the world where they even serve food and drink during the movie (or at least during an intermission).

The biggest pain people feel about movies is dealing with the proliferation of choice. It doesn't seem to me that there is an underserved market of people who would see more movies if only they knew about the good ones.

Imagine, if you will, your own personal Heaven. Presumably storytelling and movies are still happening. What is the heavenly, perfect movie-going experience? Does the movie take over your visual cortex? Are movies recommended by God - or indeed, created by Him to perfectly stimulate your mind in the way He knows you like? Does your reaction telepathically propagate to everyone else in Heaven? (Is telepathic propagation connectionless? I suppose that's another thread).

If not knowing what movie to spend your disposable income and leisure time on is an incredibly painful problem for you, you desperately need a bit of perspective.

"we're really building a system to efficiently share opinions and see what other people think."

This is exactly it - well said. And as you said, "movies are your beachhead".

All you need is why what you do is different and/or better (which is still not exactly clear, unless it's finding peers).

It's sometimes tough for engineers to be focused less on being precise in description, and more inspirational to goals. I have to work at it every day.