Yesterday we made TVLens leaner. Today I wanted to close out the open issues standing between here and a finished recommender.
One of them was a small badge, similar to Netflix’s sticker for shows in the Top 10. The idea was to mark the shows a user rates higher than everyone else does.
Before designing it, I measured it against my own ten ratings. Ranking shows by how far above the crowd I rate them produced the same order as ranking them by my own score, because with ten ratings the baselines sat close together.
So the badge would have marked exactly the shows a “you gave this five stars” badge marks, on a card that already shows my score. It would also have been lying, because no show has three other raters yet, which means every “crowd” number is really TMDb.
I shelved it. I hope to use a similar idea for other signals to the user, and during or after the beta this one may come back.
Sometimes it is okay to say no to something you want to see, because it does not make sense.