Some Netflix Users Have Rated 50,000 Shows 134
An anonymous reader writes "Netflix has released some statistics about its users, showing that more than one percent of its customer base has rated 5,000 shows or more, and a few hundred users have rated over 50,000. A reporter for The Atlantic tracked down a few of those extreme users to find out why they do it. Mike Reilly, a producer, heard about the Netflix prize, and wanted to test the limits of the movie recommendation algorithm. Lorraine Hopping Egan has rated about 6,500 movies, but she still uses word of mouth when trying to decide what to watch."
Some simple math... (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming we rate 50,000 movies at 2 hours a movie, this comes out to approximately 11.4 years of straight time. (i.e. no sleep). This does not include the amount of time to rate these items. I know tv shows are less than two hours, but if these ratings are for a series, as opposed to a simple episode, then even more time will be needed.
Nothing new here, move along... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or they do the opposite and rate every single song by his "best" artist a 5/5, even if the song is total shite.
This is more of an internal social conflict rather than some mathematical dillema, it's just people being people (and by people, I mean dicks).
Some people do watch at lot but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Some simple math... (Score:3, Interesting)
I often rate movies I have seen in the past 30 years, including many movies I never finished watching. I also rate series based on if I have watched them, dismissed them, or plan to watch them. I'm not sure how the metric of "how long it would take to watch everything rated" matters anymore than "how long it would take to meta-rank every subdomain of .com"
Re:Evidence (Score:3, Interesting)
5,000 titles isn't that impressive when you consider every TV show, documentary, and movie you've ever seen in your whole life. I rated over 2,000 titles my first day or two of Netflix just to seed the algorithm with my preferences. If I had rated every children's show (Barney for example) with one star instead of simply clicking "not interested", I would easily have over 4,000 rated by now & it's only my second month of Netflix.
My guess is most people just don't bother to rate things b/c of the time involved in clicking the ratings for each one. I swear, rating over 2,000 titles was like playing whack-a-mole for hours.
Ideas (Score:3, Interesting)
They could have watched enough of something to know they didn't like it, and giving a low rating.
They could be channeling opinions from friends.
With some botting thrown in for good measure?
Re:Some people do watch at lot but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Consider the possibility that you HATE show XYZ. Netflix, however, keeps recommending it to you, no matter how many times you rate a disk in the series poorly (I've seen this myself). It's not at all hard to imagine seeing two or three episodes, and rating 100 disks as 1-star. Of course that's a rather extreme example, but the point is valid, and it's certainly not hard to get from watching 5,000 shows, to rating 50,000, without any dishonest behavior.
the world record for movies watched is ~28k (Score:4, Interesting)
Watching that many is certainly possible, but recalling them all seems unlikely.
World record holder Gwilym Hughes got it by watching ~14 films a week from 1953 to 2008. He said: "People think that I'm glued to the television set 24 hours a day but I'm not because I'm a member of about 10 organisations. I watch films from about 9pm until about 12. Sometimes I could set up one on the televisions in the study. It works out about 10 to 14 films a week."
His favorite movies is also one of my favorites -- Lawrence of Arabia.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-11066046 [bbc.co.uk]
Re:Evidence (Score:3, Interesting)
I've rated about 3600 titles... but honestly, you don't have to watch an entire movie all the way through to give it a one star "I Hated it" or two star "I didn't like it".
It feels like I have seen hundreds of movies where a brilliant ending changed my impression of the movie from "huge waste of time" to "OMG, that was very clever, I'm going to be thinking about that for a long time!".