August 10, 2011

Crunchyroll ratings

I found my password to Crunchyroll, so now I'm looking around.

They cross-reference series by when they were broadcast, and right now I'm looking at the listings for spring 2011. Every single series is rated either 4.5 or 5 full stars out of five, usually by several hundred people. (Except Tono to Issho, which is 4.0 stars.)

There's something really wrong about that. Let's take a look further back, shall we?

Rio got 4.5 stars. Cardfight Vanguard got 4.5 stars. Shin Koihime Musou got 4.5 stars. Chu-Bra got 4.5 stars. Miracle Train got 4.5 stars. Juuden-chan got 4.5. Girls High got 4.5 (on 1502 votes).

Is there anything the people there don't like?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 05:17 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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1 It's a frequent problem in a lot of online rating systems. The only people that bother to rate have extreme views, either positive or negative.

Posted by: Boviate at August 10, 2011 05:24 PM (RPpft)

2 No anime site has an excellent rating system of ANN, where well-known series form beatuful smooth histograms, often with peaks away from 10. I attribute it to the thoughtfuly developed explanations which even a lazy teenager can easily follow. If ANN only had numerical ratings without explanations, it would end in the same boat as MAL and AnimePlanet. That is because 1. a person cannot properly grade own feelings without a scale, and 2. cannot do it in a consistent way.

Now, if you look at one person's distribution, it will trend high, if he follows the grading guidelines. This is because everyone pre-selects what he watches.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at August 10, 2011 06:20 PM (9KseV)

3 To answer Steven's direct question, Yatler is 2.0 at Crunchy, and Abunai Sisters is 1.5. Justice.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at August 10, 2011 06:25 PM (9KseV)

4 Probably most of the raters are like me. I only bother to rate the shows that I watch regularly, which means that I only give high ratings. After all, I wouldn't watch it if I didn't like it.

The vast majority of shows I don't watch at all, or drop after one episode. To make the ratings meaningful, maybe I should go through them all and give them each one star. But that would be a lot of work and in any case it hardly seems fair. Maybe one of those shows would turn out to be brilliant if I gave it a fair chance. The first episode often isn't representative, etc., etc.

Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at August 10, 2011 06:42 PM (7wFYN)

5

Jonathon, you're probably right. So the real way to find out the rating of a show is to look at how many votes there are.

So Cardfight Vanguard is 270 and Gosick is 2578 -- which sounds about right to me.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 10, 2011 06:49 PM (+rSRq)

6 Great observation, Steven.  I watch shows on Cruncyroll a lot, but ignore the ratings because of the high-bias mentioned.  I'll have to start paying attention to the number of voters from now on, see how that tracks with my preferences.

Posted by: Dave Young at August 11, 2011 08:23 AM (DYR2Q)

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