Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> And yet, reading some of the descriptions, I almost find it hard to 
> believe that they're describing the same thing. One person comments "the 
> performance by actor X was especially weak", and the next person adds 
> "for me, actor X was the best part". Wuh?!

  People tend to like wildly different things. That's true for basically
anything, be it movies, music, games, books, acting performances, and so on.

  As an example of an acting performance, in my opinion Shelley Duvall's
performance in "The Shining" is absolutely superb. Yet it seems to be an
almost universal consensus among people that her performance was horrendous.
Go figure. I suppose these people are just not seeing it in the same way
as I am.

> I notice that all of the user ratings are either 10 or 0, or very near 
> to one of those extremes. I have a couple of theories as to why:

  I think that the main psychological reason is that when the voting range
is that large, people want to make their own vote "count" more, and hence
choose only the extremes. Basically they want to shift the average as much
as possible towards their own liking.

  Some people argue that public voting like this should be restricted to
two values ("like" and "dislike") or at the very most three ("no opinion").
That way everybody's vote has the exact same weight as everybody else's,
and people can't abuse the system by voting the extremes even on very
average entries. (I don't know if YouTube has a 2-value voting system
precisely because of this, but it probably works there quite well.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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