Movdeez is my movie collection and rating website.
Ratings
The primary concept behind Movdeez is that rather than assigning ratings based on an arbitrary scale, users rank movies against all the other movies they’ve previously ranked. Over time they build a list of what they’ve seen, ordered by which they think is best.
A user’s rating is determined by where the movie is on their list. Movies at the top of the list get a 10 and movies at the bottom of the list get a 0, with everything being ranked linearly between. This gives an even distribution across the rating scale and ratings are clearly relative.
To help people rank their movies without having to sift through a large list, there is a system where they are given 4 movies from their list and asked to rank between them. Then they are presented with 4 more movies between the two they ranked between. They repeat this process until they select between two movies that are adjacent in the ranking.
I have 1163 movies in my list and it usually takes only 5 or 6 selections to find where I want a new movie. I’ve been using Movdeez since I created it in July 2020.
In addition to ranking movies, users have 3 other unordered collections they can keep track of for movies which they’ve seen, they own, and they want to see. Users can track individual viewings of a movie and add some thoughts about each viewing.
Other Movie Sites
I came up with this idea when I was frustrated by the lack of useful information I could gather from ratings on sites like TMBD and IMDb. I believe those rating systems are flawed because they just average ratings from people who mostly only use 5-8.
Rotten Tomatoes is much better. I generally glean that 90%+ is good, 70%+ is okay, and everything else is probably bad. Rotten Tomatoes sucks a bit because their critics score is more commonly advertised, but there is often better information from their audience score. I believe the studios or Rotten Tomatoes are being shady about purchasing good ratings, as well.
Movie Data
I use IMDb’s Non-Commercial Datasets, OMDb’s API, and TMDB’s API for data. TMDB’s API is the most useful. OMDb has bits of information like ratings from Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. IMDb’s dataset is mostly useful as a data dump for the big list of all movies.