- • profile/imdb lists the IMDB score of 55.360 films
• profile/SlantMag lists the SlantMag rating of 4.909 films
"I don\'t represent anyone at Slant Magazine. This is just an archive of their ratings."
• profile/avgcrtckr lists the criticker rating (i.e. average tier) of 14.310 films
There is a lot of nice stuff criticker users can do with these meta-users:
- • verifying how "mainstream" their movie taste is (the more mainstream, the lower the TCI; on the flipside, the higher the TCI, the more eccentric of a taste they have)
• identifying which rating patform corresponds best to (i.e. differs least from) a user's individual ratings
• reading SlantMag's mini-reviews without the need to go to their website
• creating a top-100 list
• discovering what filmmakers are most popular with movie audiences worldwide, i.e. rated highest by IMDB users, criticker users, SlantMag, etc. (this would require that a criticker user's filmmaker section http://www.criticker.com/?py be made publicly accessible to all other criticker users (not just to the user itself) which currently is not yet implemented … so that would be another idea for a new feature)
• etc.
(certainly tons of other things I haven't thought of, but more creative users than me will)
While all of that is quite nice, my idea is to take this one step further.
Because currently, there are several problems:
- 1. All the ratings have to be entered manually at the moment. This is such a huge task, that it is not humanely possible. Therefore a lot of films are missing (i.e. not rated by the IMDB meta-user, although there is an IMDB rating; not rated by the criticker meta-user, although there is a criticker rating; etc.). For instance, the IMDB meta-user has an enormously impressive 55360 rankings. Still it's only a fraction of all films listed on IMDB.
2. Some profiles are not actively maintained any longer (e.g. the last rating by the IMDB meta-user dates back to 18 Sep 2014).
3. meta-user rankings are static, while the scores they reflect (IMDB score, criticker score, etc.) are not. So the meta-user rankings would constantly need to be updated, which also is not humanely feasible.
Tellingly, the IMDB meta profile says: "if a rating has changed dont hesitate to let me know"
Since the repetitive human work of entering scores can easily be automated by a computer, my idea would be for criticker to create generic, automatically updating meta profiles.
I would suggest to create at least a criticker meta-user, as this one is the easiest to implement. This criticker profile would rate films according to their average tier (multiplied by 10), e.g. if a film has an average tier of 8.3 it would receive a rating of 83 by the criticker meta-profile — quite like the user "avgcrtckr" is conceived right now, but updating itself completely automatically.
Creating other meta profiles would certainly be nice and also feasible, but would probably require more work to implement. For instance, IMDB ratings could be scraped from their website, but it's probably not as straightforward as using criticker's own scores stored on the criticker server.
