9
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Does anyone else use Criticker for film and TV recommendations?
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- Title
- Criticker - Film Recommendations and Community - Rate Film and Read Film Reviews
- Word count
- 127 words
Their algorithm is excellent.
Roughly, anything they estimate at 90/100 is indeed brilliant. 80/100 is indeed good. 75/100 is still worth watching, etc.
Thank you for introducing this site! It'll be fun to play around with it and maybe be introduced to some new-to-me films and shows.
Never heard of it. Tried it just now but the ratings are weird. When I give a movie a 70 it shows it as terrible... That doesn't really compute.
That's personalized based upon the movies that you've ranked. So if you're only ranking movies you like, the movies you like the least will be termed "Terrible [relative to everything else that you've seen].”
Ah, that makes sense. Kind of a weird system though. I'll try it some more but I do wish I could select more criteria for recommendations. I generally prefer English, German or Dutch movies but I can't find a way to specify that. I don't like watching movies with subtitles, so other languages aren't really my thing. It's also showing a lot of ancient movies…
EDIT: I realized I never quite explained why your 70 is marked as "Terrible."
They're trying to account for unused parts of the rating scale. Personally, I rarely rate anything less than 40, so anything around 50 is always marked as "Terrible" since it's where my bottom 10% lives. As you fill out things you dislike as well that same movie will no longer have the "Terrible" moniker despite keeping the same 70 score. What will change is the Tier (T number), since that's what dictates the "Terrible", "Awesome", etc. labels in the first place.
Yeah, It's not exactly intuitive out of the box. But once you understand the history of things a bit more it makes sense. And you don't really have to understand it — running through the setup tutorial where you're asked to rate a bunch of popular films will give you shockingly accurate estimates. These will naturally emulate those with similar preferences and film ratings, but if you really want to dial it down Explore/Full Database has enough filters to narrow things down.
The most efficient benefit is in quickly filtering out movies that are a waste of time. But it also surfaces seemingly random films that are completely off one's radar — apparently I'll love this, for example.
It seems to have a good selection of non-English language media to rate and have sufficient user bases in the ones that matter to me.
I doubt I’d make an account and use but it looks like I can rate a particular thing and then look at other users’ rating histories that include a rating of that film/show, which is plenty useful for me.
This is kind of messing with me. I have several movies in the 1-4 range. But I gave Mr. Hulot's Holiday an 8 and their scale still thinks I believe that means "not good".
If it's weighted by how many movies are at a given point in the scale, that's going to be a problem. I make a point of not watching movies that I already know are bad, so it's pretty rare for me to rate anything below a 6. I consider a 5 watchable but forgettable.
The "Not good", "Awesome", etc. monikers don't change anything with respect to the prediction engine, they're just a representation to yourself where the film ranks relative to other films you've ranked. It would probably be sensible if they gave an option to turn it off for users who find the monikers don't match properly.
I'd suggest using the "Rate more" option until you find yourself clicking past several pages without anything you've already seen. Roughly approximating ratings for things you don't like is perfectly fine, where the system shines is at the top of the scale.
I find the predictions of things I'll love to be near infallible, with the predictions of things which are very good barely a hair behind. The films I'm predicted to find quite good are typically spot on as well, it's only once we get down into the 70-73 range and the films I know won't be that great where I encounter a drop off in predictability — but that's the "I'm only watching this because my wife wants us to" realm anyway. Nothing predicted to be 70-73 is ever worthy of 75+, but sometimes it's quite a bit worse than 70-73. The system seems to be optimized towards predicting what one will like, not what one will dislike, which of course suits me just fine.
Where it gaps a bit is when there are new categories with less data to use. Standup comedy, for example, is a category I never realized was there until recently, so my predictions were off because apparently people with a similarly snobbish taste in film and television tend to dislike standup comedy. Predictability has improved, but it's not a common enough part of the site for there to be enough data for truly great predictions yet.
On the other hand, TV shows were a new add several years back, and while they took some time to get up to speed their predictions are now right up there with films in quality.
I used to use it more actively, but it's kind of disappointing to see it's been extremely slow to modernize. I very much appreciate their recommendation system for movies and users, which is the biggest draw over a site like Letterboxd. It also has a fantastic community of people who actually seem to care about the movies they watch. Letterboxd seems to have this really bizarre cult around the site itself where almost all top reviews read like someone trying real hard to be funny on Twitter.