alt Hacker NewsI think Netflix realized that reducing ratings to a simple thumbs up/down was a bad idea after all. A while back they introduced the ability to give double thumbs up which, if you can treat non-rating as a kind of rating, means they're using a four point scale: thumbs down, no rating, thumbs up, double thumbs up.
Netflix are right that 5-stars is too many, it translates to a 6 point scale when you include non-rating, and I don't think there is a consistent view on what "3 stars" means, and how it's different to either 4 stars or 2 stars ( depending on the person ).
For some people 3 stars is an acceptable rating, closer to 4 stars than 2 stars. For others, 3 stars is a bad rating, closer to 2 stars than 5 stars. And for others still, it doesn't give signal beyond what a non-rating would be, it's "I don't have a strong opinion about this".
Effectively chopping out the 3-star rating, leaves it with a better a scale of:
With the implicit: But since it's not a survey, it doesn't need to be explicit, that's coded into not rating it instead.These are comparable to a 5 point Likert scale:
The current Netflix scale effectively merges Disagree and Strongly Disagree, and for matters of taste that may well be fine.It would be interesting to conduct social science with a similar scale with merged Disagree and Strongly disagree to see if that gave it any better consistency.