Netflix unveils "love this!" rating button for users

I am one of those people that was really unhappy when Netflix eliminated their numeric rating system and replaced it with just two options of "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." The reason for this is the same reason why a numeric system is far more effective in IMDB or any other rating website, it gives users a better understanding of overall quality than a simple "yes" or "no" answer.

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I'm a bit suspicious of Netflix and feel as though they have a political and social agenda in their programming, and when they would do something like release that really ill-conceived film Cuties that sexualized pre-teen girls people no doubt were putting a lot of thumbs down on it even if they didn't watch it.

Limiting people's options as far as rating is concerned enabled Netflix to protect certain shows and also make it possible to justify the elimination of shows that aren't what the higher ups want to protect for social reasons. This is me being a bit of a tin-foil-hat guy I know, but these days I feel that we are being programmed a bit around every turn.

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_{This was better IMO, although I don't think Armageddon deserves a 1-star rating}

Generally speaking I'm not going to allow the opinions of thousands of strangers to influence what I decide to watch because a lot of the films that I really love have terrible ratings online and some movies that I think are complete garbage have high scores on review sites. This is especially true when there is a massive disparity between professional critic and actual user scores. This was especially noticeable with the latest Star Wars films.

So what is the "Love this!" button actually going to accomplish? Is it there to help you find movies similar to the one that you saw that you just enjoyed, or is it there for the sake of manipulating what is determined to be popular on Netflix? I'd like to believe that it will be used to actually help you find things that are catered to your particular interests but I doubt that will be the case. I say this because I don't think that Netflix even categorizes their films correctly and a new James Franco film called Zeroville was in the "comedy" section yet this is NOT a comedy film. I think they ended up categorizing in this manner simply because of the people who were in it which included Will Ferrell.

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_{With a cast like that you would presume it is a comedy, but it isn't outside of a few comic relief moments}

At the end of the day I thought it was a mistake for Netflix to ever eliminate the 1-5 star rating system because I will often see a film where I can't simply state that I liked it or didn't like it... sometimes it is something in between.

So what will the new button actually accomplish? I suppose we are all just going to have to wait and see. After years of using Netflix almost daily I wouldn't say that their algorithm actually does a good job at all in finding me films that I will enjoy based on how I rated stuff, so I can't really imagine that this is going to change anything.

At the end of the day Netflix will continue to promote their own stuff on everyone's homepage regardless of what your actual interests are and of course this will include any piece of crap that they were responsible for no matter if it fits into your personal interests or not.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with rating films on Netflix at all because I'm a lot more likely to find something that I want to watch just by poking around on forums like this one online.