I don't know if my favourite film should be in the same tier as my 60th favourite

[BadCosmonaut]

The purpose of the tier system isn't to give due respects to movies you like more than other movies. The purpose of the tier system isn't to keep track of which movies are better or worse (in your opinion) than other movies. The only purpose is to divide the movies into groups so that the recommendation engine can match your profile with other people so that it can recommend movies you'll like.

Because of this, I don't see any issue with your 60th favorite movie falling into the same tier as your favorite movie, as long as the recommendation engine is otherwise functioning as well as they can make it function.

If I have say 1,000 ratings then my top-10 favourite films will be categorized in tier 10 but so will my say, 70th or 90th favourite films since each tier is worth 10%.

I think a tier 10 should be reserved for your absolute favourite films, the top 3-5%, 10% seems too large. The Tiers 7 and 8 should probably be bigger than 10% and tier 1 or 2 should probably also be a bit less than 10%. Unless you're one of those people that love to go out and watch terrible films, I think only the bottom 5% are bad enough to be in the 1st tier.

I understand what you're saying about how most people don't go out and watch bad movies. Without a doubt, many people will almost always watch movies that are highly recommended to them and therefore usually end up liking the movie. This results in there being many more movies rated in the higher percentages (for those people).

But there are many people with viewing habits and/or a method of rating movies that don't fall into that category. My spectrum of rated movies is a perfect bell curve. (Well, it isn't right this second because I'm currently in the process of re-rating every single movie I've seen). Many times when I click into someone's profile, I notice that their movie ratings are just all over the place. It's like there is no rhyme or reason to it, or maybe they have a really weird system they use. This is why critiker's tier system works, because it can accommodate them as well as the more normal users. If you force the top tier into the top 3-5% or whatever else you pick for each tier, that would work fine for you and many others, but there is a large group of users it wouldn't work for. There are too many people who have an atypical rating system or atypical viewing habits.

So then the question is, do you force those users to adjust their own ratings methodology? Or do you create a system that can accommodate both groups? This has already been answered. Critiker tries to accommodate both. That's the 10 tier system where the tiers are divided into ten groups of about the same number of movies in each group.

I wouldn't want other users to even have the ability to set their own tiers. That will allow them to interfere with the recommendations I'll be getting from them, when right now the recommendations I'm getting are "good enough."

But if someone can show anyway the recommendation engine be made to be more accurate while still accommodating all users, then I'm for it.

[paulofilmo]

i like how it's unfair fairly for everyone.

[CosmicMonkey]

Where's a statistician when you need one?

[paulofilmo]

I believe we had some, but they were frightened away during the dark times.

[lisa-]

it honestly might have been a better idea to hide tiers from the outset given the constant stream of threads related to the system, even though i like the transparency. the only purpose is tiers is to normalise ratings for the recommendation engine. that's it. let's make it clear: allowing users to modify their own tiers would seriously cripple the engine. especially for people who don't have nice neat 0-100 bell curves like myself.

one sort of related idea would be a finer gradation of percentiles - more tiers would mean fewer movies per tier. but perhaps that would be too inaccessible for those without statistical background. ten is an easy number to comprehend.

[td888]

allowing users to modify their own tiers would seriously cripple the engine. especially for people who don't have nice neat 0-100 bell curves like myself.

No it doesn't. Criticker uses the Tiers to match user's tastes. Whether or not your rankings does not match a bell-curve doesn't matter (which I honestly don't believe. Do you really watch as many bad movies as good ones or average ones?). It's actually the opposite. There are movies in my T10 which are actually a T9, but because of Criticker's evenly distribution it falls in my T10. This movie is matched against other users who have this movie correctly in their T10, so Critcker thinks our taste for this movie is the same, while it's actually not.

But even if your scores do not represent a bell-curve, you can keep the current Tier-level distribution at 10% each. As long as I can tweak mine, so my ratings fall in the correct Tier, our tastes will still be matched by the tiers.

[90sCoffee]

allowing users to modify their own tiers would seriously cripple the engine. especially for people who don't have nice neat 0-100 bell curves like myself.

Users wouldn't modify their own tiers, the site would do it globally for all users the way it does now with an even 10 percent split.

Btw I do look at the average tier rating of a film under its stats. Also, there's a user account who basically just takes every film and assigns it a score out of 100 based on its average tier score from all criticker users. So if a film's average tier is 7.51, he'll give that film a score of 75. Anyways, check his/her ratings and you'll see that every film that's rated from 72 and onwards is a tier 10 film. Doesn't anyone find that odd at all that a film with an average tier rating of 7.9 lumped into the same scale as a film with an average 7.3 tier rating. The link to that profile is below:

https://www.criticker.com/?fl&view=oth& ... zo&page=25

[lisa-]

no. why is that odd? it just means that ten percent of average ratings are 7.2 or higher.

anyway, i'm not sure what you're suggesting. take a look at my profile: what would you imagine to be the "correct" tiers that an upgraded system would compute for my ratings?

[djross]

x

[td888]

don't fix what ain't broke.

Your argument states that the status quo is acceptable and should not be improved. The current Tier system is not broken, but could certainly be improved.

Anyway, I think this discussion is moot as the persons behind Criticker don't have the time/energy to change the Tier-system as even the most 'simple' requests take ages to implement. I am already very happy they made the site mobile-friendly. Critcker is by far my most used and favourite site, I am certainly not complaining about it. But I think a discussion about the implementation of the current algorithm can be useful. I am not even talking about changing the algorithm itself, but the parameters used for the algorithm.

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would've said "a faster horse" - Henry Ford"