Goodreads does indeed suck in many ways, but I am in favor of a 5 star system! I think oftentimes we need to commit to one rating or another and not waffle around with this "4.12425/5" type reviews :)
I think most n/x rating systems are extremely weak and the level of detail is irrelevant. Averaging leads to a soup where nearly everything that isn't objectively awful falls in 60-80% rating. There's no signal to determine if it's good or just mediocre based on the rating alone. Goodreads and IMDB have been utterly useless to me.
Rotten Tomatoes' system has a lot of positives and I see a ton of signal in Rotten Tomatoes scores. It only works with a critical mass of people rating a given piece and I don't think anyone could get that critical mass for books aside from Goodreads.
I had an idea of a rating system where people would have to create a ranked list of the movies/books. Their rating for a given piece would be based on where it is in their list, linearly. Then ratings would be relative to other content. I think this would be much harder to get off the ground than a Rotten Tomatoes system.
Criticker does relative rankings, percentile-matched, in kinda the same way. For films (not books).
So if I rate Feature Film I II & III as 30 50 70, and you rate them 70 80 90, we would basically "agree". It's a neat system that I wish other rating systems would use.
Very interesting to rate movies and see what it predicts. Sometimes it's fairly spot on and other times it's way off. Very mathematical. Thanks for sharing.
