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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2697 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How important is crowdsourced feedback to you?

Ahh, but what did Netflix think? Because Netflix's algorithm is refined to your inputs. It uses affinity to track how well it thinks you will like something. It's our magic new data driven studio that creates content based on what people really want! And it gave us Orange is the New Black! And House of Cards!

And Marco Polo.

And that's my point: at the end of the day, the best curve fit is still an approximation of what you'll think, and it doesn't know things like "kleinbl00 hates watching OITNB Season 1 because the sound is shit, and Season 2 because you guys have never asked me how I feel about fat lesbians getting naked together." Some things it doesn't track well. The Napoleon Dynamite Problem has been solved for like eight years now and Netflix still gives four stars to shit that I hate, and two stars to shit that amuses the hell out of me (Netflix doesn't get irony).

And never mind the averages. Of your ten movies, you gave perfect scores to half of them. Of those four, three of them effectively got an A-. One of them got a B-. Doesn't mean they're wrong, it means they aren't tracking your tastes.

Which is pretty much this discussion in a nutshell.

Again - I'll use reviews that illuminate what, exactly, is broken about something. I didn't buy a phone system because a couple reviewers said "yeah, it supposedly does this thing, but we haven't gotten it to work." I got the more expensive version because everyone said "this thing is a total piece'o'cake to set up." It totally isn't, by the way... but tech support is super helpful so I'm happy with my choice.

It's all in how you use it.