No need for 20 points of differentiation

I was listening to my fantasy baseball podcast this morning – and apologies for making this my second straight post with a baseball tie-in, though it doesn’t stay there – and they were doing a segment called the “believe-o-meter.” The task among the hosts was to submit an answer on a 1 to 10 scale of how much they believed in what a certain previously fringy player was doing this season.

Simple, right?

Except that one guy gave the answer of a 3 ½ out of 10 on one player. And another, I think sort of as a joke and to indicate his own uncertainty, gave a 4 ¾ on another one.

It reminded me how I am sometimes asked by my writers if it would be possible to introduce halves into our rating system.

ReelGood rates movies on a scale of 1/10. For those accustomed to the sort of five-star system Letterboxd uses, it’s the same thing, you just have to multiply the star rating by two. The previous editor somehow introduced a poop emoji when he wanted to go lower than 1/10, but I don’t know how he did that within the current functions available to me, and I’m not eager to repeat it anyway. 1/10 should be the minimum, just as a half-star on Letterboxd is the minimum. If you try to rate a movie 0/5 on Letterboxd, it just looks like you didn’t give it a star rating at all.

In either system that’s ten points of differentiation in quality. And ten should be enough.

We don’t need 20.

In the extremest of olden days, I think there might have only been four-point rating systems for the quality of things. One to four stars, no halves. I agree that that is too limiting to indicate finer points of quality, and so various systems involving five points (a five-star system) or eight points (four stars but with halves) were introduced. Our current ten-point scale is the best iteration anyone's thought of so far.

But the reality is, when you only regularly use a couple different ratings to indicate movies you like but don’t love – from 3 stars to 4, or from 6/10 to 8/10 – you do sometimes feel the need to indicate more nuance.

So that same former editor will sometimes say to me “I might give it a harsh 7,” or “I might give it a generous 8.” That would be talking about the same movie, but in one case you go a tick above, and sometimes you go a tick below. A rating of 7 ½ would solve the problem.

But are we really so wishy washy that we can’t take care of this problem in just ten different points? Our readers require us to be definitive, while understanding that not every film can be distilled down to a number, and that of course it’s just our opinion anyway, and opinions differ.

The real problem – and this is one I continue to come back to time and again on this blog – is that I am not making full use of the full range of ten ratings. Because I’m a bit of a softie, I give a significant number of films somewhere in that 6 to 8 range, in that I can usually find something about it that’s good enough to give it a 6. But sometimes I even feel bad about a 6, like it’s a slap in the face. And that leaves five whole numbers to indicate small gradations in films that are not very good.

I’m not going to change my rating system overnight to the one my former editor already uses, in which he reserves 8s for films he truly loves and almost never gives out 9s and 10s. That’s too far in the other direction, but it does mean he’s using more of the range, or perhaps at least is less reliant on halves. He might be using the same amount of the range, just shifted more negatively.

And I might not use the rating range as I ideally would, but at least I recognize that halves have no place on a ten-point scale.