OK, I’ve had my little hissy fit about Google and they must have read my post because the last time I went to AdWords the site seemed to load quickly. BTW, yes, it did make me feel better. Now we can get back to matters at hand.
Today I would like to talk about how silly and utterly useless the YouTube rating system is. I mean what’s the deal every video on the site has 5 stars???!! Even the crappy ones have 5 stars. I don’t get it? It leads me to conclude that the rating system doesn’t work. So I give the YouTube rating system one star!
I admit that I’m guilty of giving a video 5 stars that didn’t really deserve or rise to the the level of “Awesome”. I don’t know why for sure. Maybe I thought the person was trying hard and needed some encouragement or perhaps I figured because I took the time to watch that alone was worth the 5 stars, ’cause I wouldn’t waste my time checking out a crappy video. Who knows? All I’m sure of is the rating system is not an accurate representation of a videos merit!
So the question must be asked, what do we do about this problem, how do we fix it? I have a suggestion. We all need to rate more honestly and make 3 stars (worth watching) the standard. Reserving 4 & 5 stars for those super videos that are truly great. However, human nature what it is and vast differences in content and personal taste, lead me to believe this solution won’t make much difference.
After some thought, I firmly think we should do away with human rating and the rating should be calculated by an algorithm. One that takes into account how many views a video has received, the amount of time each viewer watches the video and the number of users that have added it as a “favorite”. After all, who knows more about tracking page views and time spent on web pages than Google? They already have a little analytic program for users called “insight”. This data could be used in someway and I think we should track non registered users for page views and time spent on a videos page as well.
Perhaps there’s another solution, what do you think?
YouTube Rating System Gets One Star
Thursday, August 6th, 2009OK, I’ve had my little hissy fit about Google and they must have read my post because the last time I went to AdWords the site seemed to load quickly. BTW, yes, it did make me feel better. Now we can get back to matters at hand.
Today I would like to talk about how silly and utterly useless the YouTube rating system is. I mean what’s the deal every video on the site has 5 stars???!! Even the crappy ones have 5 stars. I don’t get it? It leads me to conclude that the rating system doesn’t work. So I give the YouTube rating system one star!
I admit that I’m guilty of giving a video 5 stars that didn’t really deserve or rise to the the level of “Awesome”. I don’t know why for sure. Maybe I thought the person was trying hard and needed some encouragement or perhaps I figured because I took the time to watch that alone was worth the 5 stars, ’cause I wouldn’t waste my time checking out a crappy video. Who knows? All I’m sure of is the rating system is not an accurate representation of a videos merit!
So the question must be asked, what do we do about this problem, how do we fix it? I have a suggestion. We all need to rate more honestly and make 3 stars (worth watching) the standard. Reserving 4 & 5 stars for those super videos that are truly great. However, human nature what it is and vast differences in content and personal taste, lead me to believe this solution won’t make much difference.
After some thought, I firmly think we should do away with human rating and the rating should be calculated by an algorithm. One that takes into account how many views a video has received, the amount of time each viewer watches the video and the number of users that have added it as a “favorite”. After all, who knows more about tracking page views and time spent on web pages than Google? They already have a little analytic program for users called “insight”. This data could be used in someway and I think we should track non registered users for page views and time spent on a videos page as well.
Perhaps there’s another solution, what do you think?
Tags: broken, rating, stars, system, youtube
Posted in Commentary | Comments Off