I wanted to try the netflix challenge but never seem to have the time. This seems something that needs to be addressed. I’m a little busy right now so don’t know if this has already been addressed by netflix but this seems a too gross oversight from them.
Stole this from the comments of the previous linked marginal revolutions post.
Interesting — I have the opposite complaint about the Netflix 5-star rating system: I think it is too course. Why? Because even there are 5 ratings, it’s really effectively only 3 ratings if you only bother to rent movies you are actually willing to watch; the movies that I would give one or two star ratings to mostly go completely unwatched and unrated by me. As a result, if I am going to reserve the 5-star rating for movies I think of as truly excellent, most of the movies I watch end up with 3 or 4 star ratings — and as a consequence, Netflix’s *predictions* of ratings of films that I haven’t seen seem all to end up in the 3.3 to 4.5 star range. I suspect that the predictions would end up a little more accurate if I had a 3.5 star and 4.5 star rating available.
Marginal Revolution: *Spin* magazine moves from a five star system to ten.