Floatplane- BRING BACK STARS RATING. Pls :)

[CuriousBread]

For those among us who qualify for senior coffee discount at McDanks, we remember the good ol days when YouTube used to have a rating systems based on stars. 

Back before YouTube hid the thumbs down rating. 

Back before the thumbs. 

 

 

I think it'd be kinda neat if Floatplane can bring that feature back because : 

 

1. It let's the viewer give a more granular feedback about how much they liked the video. 
2. It gives the makers a more granular picture of how the video is doing. Each star rating is a data point, meanwhile thumbs operate on binary. 

[LogicalDrm]

You can send Floatplane requests best by using their support email/form.

 

Imo star rating only works when it is driven from categories. How would you make difference between 4 and 5 star video? When it could be like Amazon does it with content, edits/shooting, helpfulness/entertainment etc. On closed media platform where you go to specifically see something by someone, how others view something shouldn't make that big deal to you. But on open media platforms, like Youtube, FB etc. how other see something that you don't already know is more meaningful.

[Kopaka]

With star ratings most people are just going to vote 1 or 5 anyway, so it's not really helpful.

[Avocado Diaboli]

They should offer a 1-100% scale, so every video ends up with a 69% rating. Seriously though, why would you need any granularity? You either like something or you don't, for elaborations on that, leave a comment.

[CuriousBread]

20 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

They should offer a 1-100% scale, so every video ends up with a 69% rating. Seriously though, why would you need any granularity? You either like something or you don't, for elaborations on that, leave a comment.

There are levels of liking something, we are humans, not computers that operate on boolean logic, and parsing feedback from comments is an extra step from reading just average star rating. 

[Avocado Diaboli]

38 minutes ago, CuriousBread said:

There are levels of liking something, we are humans, not computers that operate on boolean logic, and parsing feedback from comments is an extra step from reading just average star rating. 

That only tracks if everybody uses the same metrics for any given star rating. Which, as you pointed out, is impossible because we're not computers. That's why an unambiguous binary choice is better. Not that it matters, it's just video ratings.

[LogicalDrm]

6 hours ago, CuriousBread said:

There are levels of liking something, we are humans, not computers that operate on boolean logic, and parsing feedback from comments is an extra step from reading just average star rating. 

Star rating wouldn't work with that logic. Like just answer my earlier question, how do you define difference between 1 or 2 stars? Or 4 and 5? Since a star alone doesn't mean anything unless its universally defined by something. So I think with your suggestion there needs to be two levels. End result showing as stars. But to viewer it should be more expressive. Like "Bad content", "Not interesting", "Too sponsored", "Acceptable", "Good content", "Excellent", "Entertaining" etc. with numeric value assigned to all. In same way as questionnaires use 1-5 ranking from "Strongly agree" to "Strongly disagree". But if we let platform/creator make ranking, it wouldn't really matter either. So for that, +1/-1 is enough.

[Stahlmann]

Star ratings are useless most of the time. 99% of the 4.5-5 star rated products on Amazon are absolute garbage. 99% of all user reviews on PCpartpicker are 5 stars just because it works, not considering value, competitive products or anything else.  There are many more examples i could name. That being said, all subjective review methods are deeply flawed, so i don't really have a better alternative to call out either.

[CuriousBread]

12 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

Star rating wouldn't work with that logic. Like just answer my earlier question, how do you define difference between 1 or 2 stars? Or 4 and 5? Since a star alone doesn't mean anything unless its universally defined by something. So I think with your suggestion there needs to be two levels. End result showing as stars. But to viewer it should be more expressive. Like "Bad content", "Not interesting", "Too sponsored", "Acceptable", "Good content", "Excellent", "Entertaining" etc. with numeric value assigned to all. In same way as questionnaires use 1-5 ranking from "Strongly agree" to "Strongly disagree". But if we let platform/creator make ranking, it wouldn't really matter either. So for that, +1/-1 is enough.

By the same metric, thumbs up and down also doesn't mean anything because the threshold for someone to press up or down is different for everyone. Say maybe a lot of people interested in a certain topic has a very low threshold for liking something, thereby generating a lot of thumbs up, however another topic the people interested has a higher threshold, thereby generating less thumbs, but they don't dislike it enough to press thumbs down. 

 

What the stats system gives however is we can parse the degree someone likes something. Maybe in the later example, people still liked it, but just not that much, they can give it...3 stars to say it's just a meh video. Can't do that with thumbs. 

[Avocado Diaboli]

6 hours ago, CuriousBread said:

What the stats system gives however is we can parse the degree someone likes something. Maybe in the later example, people still liked it, but just not that much, they can give it...3 stars to say it's just a meh video. Can't do that with thumbs. 

You can neither with a star system. Let's look at game reviews for a second as an example: It's been a long standing tradition that the 10 point score is not representative of how well a game is received. Quite a few publications don't consider a 5 as average. They consider it as bad and anything below is varying shades of bad. A real average is a 7 for those publications. Trouble is when you then try to agregate those scores on something like Metacritic, because a publication that sticks with 5 = average and another that uses 7 = average will not give a true representation of what the media landscape is. The same thing happens with star systems. People don't have the same baseline. What is a 4? A meh video with some interesting bits? A good video held back by some bad bits? Is 5 stars a perfect video? If so, is a great video for those people a 4? Or is 5 stars just a generally enjoyable video with no serious flaws, but nothing outstanding?

 

Never mind that you will never be looking at individual ratings anyway. For all intents and purposes, all you need is what YouTube used to have, which is a like/dislike binary choice and a corresponding ratio that tells you how many people liked or disliked a video. That way you get a true representation of how a video gets judged based on unambiguous feedback. And again, if you want to give context to your vote, leave a comment.

[CuriousBread]

On 6/29/2023 at 10:01 PM, Avocado Diaboli said:

You can neither with a star system. Let's look at game reviews for a second as an example: It's been a long standing tradition that the 10 point score is not representative of how well a game is received. Quite a few publications don't consider a 5 as average. They consider it as bad and anything below is varying shades of bad. A real average is a 7 for those publications. Trouble is when you then try to agregate those scores on something like Metacritic, because a publication that sticks with 5 = average and another that uses 7 = average will not give a true representation of what the media landscape is. The same thing happens with star systems. People don't have the same baseline. What is a 4? A meh video with some interesting bits? A good video held back by some bad bits? Is 5 stars a perfect video? If so, is a great video for those people a 4? Or is 5 stars just a generally enjoyable video with no serious flaws, but nothing outstanding?

 

Never mind that you will never be looking at individual ratings anyway. For all intents and purposes, all you need is what YouTube used to have, which is a like/dislike binary choice and a corresponding ratio that tells you how many people liked or disliked a video. That way you get a true representation of how a video gets judged based on unambiguous feedback. And again, if you want to give context to your vote, leave a comment.

Data graded in absolute is worthless, a 10 in isolation just means it's as high as it can go, a 10 means nothing, how it does compare to OTHERS makes it useful. You aren't thinking as a producer, you're thinking as a consumer. 

Say the dataset of video's average rating is 2.5, 3, 3.2, 2.8, 4.8, 3.1, 2.9. 

The 4.8 video is an outlier and with that you can dive deeper into why that specific video is doing so well. 

 

You have that very same problem with thumbs. How enjoyable does a video needs to be before a viewer will click thumbs up? The threshold is different for everyone. If anything it's even worse with a thumbs system since it's pure boolean logic, 1-0. Maybe something is bothering the viewers but it's not bad enough to trigger the thumbs-down threshold. If it were stars, it would be enough to trigger it from a 4 star video to a 3 star. 

 

I refuse to believe ya'll fundamentally don't understand the logic of why a grading system is superior in generating usable data as opposed to a pass/fail analogue that is thumbs up/down. 

[Avocado Diaboli]

7 hours ago, CuriousBread said:

I refuse to believe ya'll fundamentally don't understand the logic of why a grading system is superior in generating usable data as opposed to a pass/fail analogue that is thumbs up/down. 

You literally just demonstrated how both are worthless as a means of statistical analysis. That's because the values aren't labelled. This isn't a scientific survey where they rate things like this:

 

1 - Terrible

2 - Kinda bad

3 - Average

4 - Good

5 - Great

 

As you said, not everybody has the same interpretation of what the values mean and not everybody has the same criteria for why a given response would fall into any given rating. Not to mention that you or the content creator also have their own interpretations of what these numbers mean. You keep defeating the purpose of your own suggestion. This isn't about understanding the logic of granularity in gathering data. This is about you not understanding the subtle difference in properly aggregating data. Content websites aren't scientific surveys, so they tend to just give you basic tools to rate things. As such, these ratings tend to be next to useless, especially if they offer more granularity than they reasonably need to. Again, this is just about video ratings, so nothing really important. How are you inconvenienced by not getting to give detailed feedback on an arbitrary 5 point scale that you don't have through a literal comment box?

[CuriousBread]

On 7/1/2023 at 6:27 AM, Avocado Diaboli said:

You literally just demonstrated how both are worthless as a means of statistical analysis. That's because the values aren't labelled. This isn't a scientific survey where they rate things like this:

 

1 - Terrible

2 - Kinda bad

3 - Average

4 - Good

5 - Great

 

As you said, not everybody has the same interpretation of what the values mean and not everybody has the same criteria for why a given response would fall into any given rating. Not to mention that you or the content creator also have their own interpretations of what these numbers mean. You keep defeating the purpose of your own suggestion. This isn't about understanding the logic of granularity in gathering data. This is about you not understanding the subtle difference in properly aggregating data. Content websites aren't scientific surveys, so they tend to just give you basic tools to rate things. As such, these ratings tend to be next to useless, especially if they offer more granularity than they reasonably need to. Again, this is just about video ratings, so nothing really important. How are you inconvenienced by not getting to give detailed feedback on an arbitrary 5 point scale that you don't have through a literal comment box?

Then by the same arguement both thumbs and stars are completely worthless and it should just be removed instead of keeping useless metrics on the screen. Viewtime is also irrelevant as a metric since everyone's valuation of their time viewing something is different as a metric of their satisfaction. 

Satisfaction is not an objective variable, it is used with reference to each other. The stats of one video compared to the other. Even if everyone's thresholds are different, with a big enough data set, when the videos are compared against each other the difference gives you valuable data. 

 

1-5 can mean anything you want it to mean verbally, it's just a number that let people express the level of satisfaction that then let you aggregate and compare. 

 

I'm done, it's like talking to a wall.