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.
KalltKaffe wrote: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.