A silly way to keep track of and rate the movies and shows you've watched.
- Install this Chrome extension.
- Go to IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes.
- Look for Craig Robinson's face on movie posters:
Nearly a decade ago an article (from a now-defunct website) titled Why Ratings Systems Don't Work popped up on Hacker News.
The XKCD comic about star ratings at the top of the article perfectly encapsulates a major problem with user ratings that is a persistent annoyance: Excessive granularity.
Even in a 5-star system, a 2-star rating is guaranteed to be the least used. Doesn't matter what is being rated. It's like a law of consumer rating physics.
The article goes on to introduce an idea that has stuck with me ever since: Using a dual-axis rating system for movies.
There's really only two things we care about when we're deciding how to judge a film. One is the pure entertainment value we personally get from it, and the other is what we perceive as its artistic merit. The former dominates our judgements when we're alone and trying to pick a movie on Netflix. The latter when we're sharing our opinions with others.
Consider a movie that you'd call a "guilty pleasure". The implication is that everyone knows this is a "bad" movie, but you love to watch it anyway and you've seen it many times.
At the other end, consider a movie that you wouldn't have watched had it not won a bunch of awards, yet bored you to tears. You never want to watch that movie again, yet you can see the technical filmmaking achievements on display that earned the film so much regonition on its artistic merits.
Obviously, trying to conflate these two disparate concepts into a single magic number is a fool's errand. The same concept applies to books, music, video games, etc.
The natural thing to do is disambiguate these competing judgements and rate movies on both of these axes.
The first, your personal enjoyment of a film, is best captured as "rewatchability", a measure of how much you'd enjoy watching the film again.
The second is the perceived "artistic merit" of the film (which the article calls "quality").
This gives an infinitely clearer picture on how we really feel about a particular movie. Plus you can make cool scatter plots from the data, and 90% of the reason that engineers do anything is so they can make cool charts that no one looks at.
(Just when you thought a README for a meme extension couldn't get any more pontificatory...)
When you rate a movie with I SEENT IT!, you're first asked to rate its rewatchability before its artistic merit. This might seem backwards, but its very intentional.
With any sort of quiz-esque UX, the context created by prior questions affects the user's answers on subsequent questions. It's like the observer effect but with surveys.
In this case, the artistic merit score is less impacted by a prior watchability score than vice-versa. Rewatchability is personal and easy to rate. All one has to do is think "if this movie was on right now, would I watch it?" and the answer is instantly clear.
It's the artistic merit we hem and haw over. An entire industry exists to debate the artistic merits of films. They literally hand out PhDs for it. The cognitive overhead of assigning a rating is trivial for rewatchability, and nontrivial for artistic merit.
By rating rewatchability first, you avoid having your thoughts colored with cultural baggage when deciding how much you personally enjoy a film. The effect of your prior rewatchability score has a comparatively smaller impact on your artistic merit score. It's easier to "change gears" in one direction, harder in the other. This strategy also pushes UX friction downstream. A user's motivation to finish a flow is proportional to the effort they've put in so far. Sunk cost fallacy FTW!
I just made all of that up but it sounds good. #bikeshedding
A while back I tried to take an inventory of all the movies I'd watched. This turned out to be much harder than anticipated. I watch too many damn movies. My manually curated spreadsheet that preceeded this extension had nearly 1000 entries before I gave up.
There were services out there for keeping track of the things you've seen, but none of them gave me the impression they'd still be around in 10 years.
More importantly, I wanted something I could use passively. I don't want to have to carve out time to go hunting for movies to add to the list. Every time I was on sites like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB, I'd find myself thinking "man it'd be great if all these movie listings had some UI to track what I've seen". This was especially true when using these sites to discover new things to watch.
So I built it. And included the One True Rating System. And wrote this novel.
Everything is automagically synced to your Chrome profile, so your data will stay consistent across your devices.
To view your collection and manage your data, open the Options page. Here's one way to do so:
- Click the puzzle piece icon to the right of the URL bar.
- Click the three dot menu icon for the I SEENT IT! extension.
- Click "Options".
- Support text-based filmography lists (needs a mini UI treatment).
- S C A T T E R P L O T S