
Ask HN: An alternative to IMDB scores, whats a better way to pick movies? - pauljeba
I like IMDB rating, helps find the best movies easily. But, recently when I decide to watch a movie based on the scores alone, I have been greatly disappointed. Eg. The Joker 2019 movie is highly rated, but its not the movie for me. I don&#x27;t generally like such sad and mind-fuck kind of movies.<p>Has anyone thought about this? I would like to create a new movie rating system, that will be easy to pick the right movies.
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s1t5
The best indicator is a recommendation from someone whose opinion on movies is
largely aligned with yours. I suppose you need a platform where the user is
profiled and matched against reviewers/raters/critics with similar tastes. Has
anyone done this?

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bobsoap
criticker.com does exactly this by normalizing individual user ratings into
percentiles and calculating a "Taste Compatibility Index", floating those
users whose ratings are closest aligned with yours to the top (and their
highest-rated movies). In my case, the resulting predicted score for most
movies is close to 80% accurate. Highly recommended site.

[https://www.criticker.com/](https://www.criticker.com/)

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matt_s
When it comes to picking things you are spending your free time on, movies,
dining out, video games, books, etc. you are more likely to immediately not
even consider stuff you strongly dislike. Its really frustrating to see things
in lists you wouldn't even consider. You lose any hope in that system being
able to help you find something to escape reality for a while.

What is needed is a movie pick service and that starts with asking what genres
you hate. Then get into specific movies you hate to further refine the list of
things I don't want to see but at the same time clarifying questions to narrow
down the like/dislikes because there are movies that combine elements from
different genres. For example, The Joker could be considered in the
#superhero, #sad, #mind-fuck categories and if you like #superhero movies but
strongly dislike #sad and #mind-fuck then those should be weighted higher and
the system shouldn't show The Joker on any personal lists.

The service should have an unfiltered search so people can just find stuff
too.

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pauljeba
Exactly, free time is a premium and has to be treasured.

I think a quiz like what you meantioned would be effective. The problem is
finding data that could help power such a quiz. Example, a #tag of #sad could
be assigned to a movie that's just 20% sad, leading to
misuse/misinterpretation. What we may need is a variable-tag metric... But I
don't think there is any available data for this yet..

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slightwinder
It's impossible to press a complex object into singular value. Everyone has
different key aspects and you can't see from a single value which key aspects
are strong and which are weak.

Read some reviews and critics to get a hint on the vibes and content of a
movie and whether it matches your personal taste. IMDB has them both.

~~~
pauljeba
What about multiple metrics, which each can talk about specific aspects of why
someone would watch a movie. I could then weigh these metrics as per my
preference and choose the movie of my liking. Do you get it?

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slightwinder
Sure, you can do that. There are sites doing this, many more did that in the
past. Most failed at some point because the amount of work, knowledge and
dedication for this to reach a critical mass of uptodate meaningful data is to
big to survive longterm.

And in the first place you will be very busy to figure which metrics you want
in the first place. You basically need a complete set of them before you even
begin for serious, because otherwise you will invalidate all older entries if
you add metrics later.

Thinking about, tags are popular today, several media centred-sites are using
them to allow a kind of freeform-metric to describe content. Maybe with modern
solutions you can do something machine learning-voddoo to extract tags from
reviews and generate meaningful metrics for describing impressions of a movie.

~~~
pauljeba
You are very right, especially with the challenges in making it successful.
Crowd sourcing or Machine Learning are the options I guess, each with its pros
and cons.

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dodgyb
Metacritic consistently come out on top when compared to IMDB and Rotten
Tomatoes. This article is a good dive into the pros and cons:

[https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/02/04/imdb-rotten-
to...](https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/02/04/imdb-rotten-tomatoes-
metacritic-data-scientists-guide-movie-ratings/)

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IndexPointer
Only you can know what you like.

The more movies you watch, the better your intuiton for predicting if you'll
like the movie by watching the trailer will get.

I found imdb scores are good to have a general idea. Eg I probably won't like
a movie with a 5.9 score, even if the trailer seemed good. Or I'll give a
movie with a >8 score a chance if the trailer is okay, but sometimes I know a
movie is not for me by the trailer, no matter how high the score is.

For everything in between I decide mostly by the trailer and the past movies
of the director.

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pauljeba
What do you look for in a trailler ? Could you describe the process in few
words?

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IndexPointer
>Could you describe the process in few words?

Not really, I wouldn't know how to describe it. I just have an intuition of
when a movie is "promising" according to my taste. An intuition that gets
better the more trailer and movies I watch.

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Jugurtha
I like a few actors, directors, screenwriters. I watch what they did, and
watch movies when one of them makes one. I can't watch anything else. It
limits the movies I can watch to one or two per couple of years, but it's
okay.

I used to be a voracious movie consumer when I was younger, but it's due to
the fact there was a backlog. Now there is none.

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avocadoLife
I've had some good recommendations from
[https://movielens.org/](https://movielens.org/)

Also, if you like a particular movie/genre then it's best to google for
similar ones. People tend to recommend 'if you like X then you should also
check out Y'. I've found this to be a decent indicator.

~~~
pauljeba
I like these profile based recommendations, but they tend to be black box
ones. They miss out on the how I may like a future movie that I have not come
across before. I like how nomadlist.com has done it for places. You can easily
figure out which place to go, just using their fitlers.

Would a similar filter be useful for movies?

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dairylee
In the past I used to use Criticker
([https://www.criticker.com/](https://www.criticker.com/)) and found that once
I'd rated some movies the recommendations were very good.

But like others have said the easiest way is to find a friend/critic who has
similar taste to you and just see what they recommend.

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pauljeba
I am really looking for an answer to this. I promise to incorporate the best
answer arriving out of our discussion in my site flixcatalog.com. I don't
think the existing filter on imdb scores makes sense.

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11874442
Isn't the current iMDB score just an average of everyones scores combined?

How do you propose a scoring system would work where movies are scored
according to your preference in movies?

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pauljeba
If you look at what nomadlist.com has done for places - I can easily figure
out if I would like to visit a place or not, by selecting their emoji based
filters.. I think a similar emoji based rating, that could say how sad a movie
is, how happy a movies is, etc, could be useful. What you think?

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11874442
Personally I would associate a frowning/sad emoji with something negative; the
movie is bad etc.

It sounds like you want to seperate the rating and emotion/vibe of a movie,
and score/rate both?

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pauljeba
Yes, emotions- "how does one feel while watching the movie". This is missing
from the traditional genre tagging - "whats the movie about"

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IndySun
You could, instead of looking at the score only, also use the tags on imdb to
at least guide you to films of interest to you.

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pauljeba
You mean the genre tags, like crime, thriller, etc?

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IndySun
Yes. Things like that, plus the certificate, the mood you're in, the usual
reasons for sitting down to some visual presentation. Also, on imdb the scores
are incredibly mean average for very popular movies and can vary wildly on the
lesser known. If you take a look at a movie you love, and one you hate, you
can find a surprisingly short width of score. What this means is that the
meaningful scores are 6ish to 8ish. Most popular Movies sit in that area,
hence a 6ish in genre you like may actually be rated great by you and an 8ish
in genre you dislike might mean you'd appreciate it though not love it.

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5041us
letterboxd.com - The score is a good reference, but you will also find really
good lists from users with the same taste as yours.

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pauljeba
I like letterboxd, but unless I read through all the comments, I can't make
out if I would like a movie or not. There scoring is similar to imdb. I dont
think just a simple rating system would be a solution.

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baspey
The most efficient solution is to give the user a predicted rating which tells
him at first glance how much he'll like a movie. Of course the prediction is
based on how much the user has liked other movies (collaborative filtering).
Netflix used to do that quite well until their recommendation system went down
the drain for marketing reasons. My app Coollector Movie Database works on
that principle.

