FlickChart Makes Movie Ranking Fun

@hatsumi: Awesome, glad to hear you like it. :)

The good news on the Netflix front is that it's our goal to integrate that soon. The most obvious place is on the list of movies you haven't seen ("Add to My Netflix Queue"), although I'd really like to see the same option on the homepage so that right when you see it show up there, you can add it. We just have to figure out how to make it look nice and accessible... which is hard sometimes as you add tons of new features.

As for the foreign language posters, I think we're going to add hiding those as an option to your profile. It depends on the person -- some people love the variety, but other people get confused. And believe me, it's even happened to me... and yes, despite the fact that the title is down there. :P

Thanks a lot for your input and encouragement. BTW, if you want to report a bug or request a feature going forward, you can check out our GetSatisfaction page at [www.getsatisfaction.com] (or use the Feedback tab on the right-hand side of the site, which posts to the same place).

Prophasi

@shinchan: It's mostly movies that Americans would know right now -- nearly all English-language and those handful (Monty Python, Crouching Tiger, Amelie, some others) that have made it to the US.

That's not by design or interest -- my partner Nathan is very into anime among other things, for instance -- it's just the database we've started with for accessibility reasons. We're adding more all the time, though, and international movies are coming up hopefully before too long.

Prophasi

@allauthors: 2. That's a great idea. I was thinking that we'd be able to derive the recommendations from the normal ranking data -- and that will be relevant no matter what -- but you're absolutely right that the same mechanism can be used for a more explicit recommendation engine. Thank a lot for the thoughts -- we'll definitely throw that into the discussion when we hash that part out. Our hope all along is that this metric is a new angle for recommendations, and your idea might help with that.

3. You can currently filter by your list by using the Top Movies -> Top 20/50/100/250 filter above the matchups (if you haven't used it already). It doesn't check which specific matchups you haven't done (which you'll see quickly, because there are dupes, unfortunately). I have the data, I just don't check it yet because of performance reasons. Hopefully we'll get there.

Prophasi

So far I've gotten through 11 rankings. I have to say, this is kind of fun. :) There are movies that I forgot I had seen. And then there are the ones that I keep meaning to watch, but haven't yet. I can see myself playing with this for HOURS... I'll have to tell my husband about it, too. He's a movie junkie. And he uses Netflix like mad, so any kind of collaboration or integration between Netflix and flickchart would be all kinds of awesome.

Anyway, one weird thing that I noticed is that a lot of the movie posters that are coming up on my screen are in Korean, Spanish, or some other language. I've almost clicked "Haven't See It" simply because I didn't recognize the name. And yes, I know the actual title is written out right underneath the posters, but I guess I'm more of a visual person. Aside from that, though, it's looking great so far!

Oh, and the speed of the site has improved since I first tried using it earlier today. /cheer

Things are too slow at the moment to really test things out properly (so this question might be irrelevant); but what I have been wondering from the start is:
What kind of films are in that list?

I watch quite a few obscure films, and a bunch of not American films. Does the list include any of those? Or is it purely mainstream Hollywood stuff?

shinchan

@Andy Hilal: You can look at even completely disparate movies, like the matchup you described, and decide which movie is better for you. Not what you think the world thinks is better, but your personal taste as to which you'd rather watch again - or perhaps one has better acting, better cinematography, better story - there's always some trait that makes it better in your eyes.

The more people make these difficult choices, the closer we come to a holistic, true best-of list for film.

Nathan Chase

The matchups have to kind of make sense, too. For example, Terminator: Slavation vs. Star Trek (2009) would be a great matchup to put out there, because they're both sci-fi blockbusters for the mainstream audience which people may be thinking about seeing right now.

I just got Princess Bride vs. Boogie Nights.

Which is better? I dunno, they're both great. And they're completely different. Better for what purpose?

Andy Hilal

@allauthors: final thought: just add a filter "by my list" and it only brings up pairs of movies in your list that you have not compared. Once every movie in your list has been compared against every other one (or every one it needed to be to be firmly placed) it tells you "You have compared every movie in your list."

allauthors

@Prophasi: RE #1. That sounds perfect. Much better than my suggestion.

2. Actually, keeping perfectly in the spirit of the site, you could pick a movie to "rank movies like this one" It shows that movie at the top (or somewhere) and then displays to random movies (as always). You select which of the two movies is more like your chosen one. Have a bunch of people doing that with movies that are at the top of their favorites list, and you'll have really great recommendations in no time.

allauthors

@superrrguy:
The way I handled this was by making ten decisions with the autorank (putting 20 movies on my chart), then selecting ten of my own favorites. Then, I did some ranking within my own top list, which helped to balance out the weight of the number ranking.

team.bates

@allauthors: 1. The way I'm currently thinking of implementing that feature is this (and please tell me what you think):

On the filter bar at the top, we combine year/decade into "By Date." We add another filter, "By Movie." When you click on that, you get an auto-suggest textbox where you start typing the name of a movie. You find it, you click it, it becomes the left movie in the matchup. We grab a second movie from the middle of your list and put it on the right.

I do a binary comparison (always splitting the remaining list in half, depending on whether your movie wins or loses), so I tell you how many rankings you have before it find its spot; that number counts down each click.

Voila, it finds its spot, we tell you something like "After 6 rankings, Big Trouble in Little China entered your list at #54."

2. And yes, recommendations are coming. Good idea on how to approach it, and one that keeps with the spirit of the site.

Prophasi

@greatodinsraven: If that were where the list ended, I'd agree. After your first rankings, it's gonna be a mess; each pair of movies has to get into the list SOMEWHERE, so that's how they're inserted.

But as you rank, those movies get constantly paired against new movies, as well as against lower movies in your list that the algorithm thinks you like better. It takes a little more time the roundabout way than just cutting to the point and listing movies in order, yeah. But:

a) It's meant to be fun. I get a ton of matchups where my reaction is "OHH! Man. That's tough" and ask who's sitting next to me what THEY would say. You can share any matchup to FriendFeed, and dozens of users have done so now, creating threads of sometimes near 100 comments arguing about the matchups.

b) It's more granular than stars or percentages. If you have 50 5-star movies, you can't derive what order they go in for you.

c) (Our theory is that) it's more personal. You don't make an abstract list by shuffling movie names around without paying much attention to any in particular: if you *think* you love Pulp Fiction that much, you'll have to specifically say yes, it's better than The Empire Strikes Back, one on one, mano a mano.

At least, those are the thoughts behind it. And yes, I do feel bad every time I vote against Airplane!. But you gotta do what ya gotta do.

Prophasi

@Prophasi: As an addendum to item #1, probably even better would be to pick a movie and say "rank this movie against my favorites list" and it starts with your favorite movie and you compare until you put it above a movie at which point it has found it's place in your list. This would even suitably replace item number 2 because it would essentially allow me to build my list by find movie, rank against my list, find movie, rank against my list.

I'd also love to see a feature that allows me to do the same thing, but instead of just ranking movies for "all time" allows me to rank them for "how close is this movie to that movie" the combination of people's all time lists plus people's rankings of "movies that are like this one" would allow for a really amazing recommendation system.

allauthors

@allauthors: We're working on point #1 this weekend, actually. It'll work as another filter, none of which, I might add, are probably worth trying out now because of the slowness.

2. We've gotten that request a handful of times, and although I haven't been inclined toward it myself, it's something we're considering.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to make the suggestions -- much appreciated.

Prophasi

Let me give you an analogy demonstrating why this doesn't make a lot of rational sense as a rating system.

Let's say you're rating women (let's face it, we do it constantly anyway):

"Comparison 1": Superhot Megamodel A vs Superhot Megamodel B

Let's say you pick A. Your rankings:

1. Superhot Megamodel A
2. Superhot Megamodel B

Next, you get Comparison B:

Janeane Garofalo (Janis) vs Mary Lynn Rajskub (Chloe)

Let's say you (shudder and) pick Garafalo. Your rankings:

1. Superhot Megamodel A
2. Janeane Garofalo
3. Mary Lynn Rajskub
4. Superhot Megamodel B

On what planet does that make any sense??

Although, I suppose, when it comes to women, we really put them into "Yes, I would" and "Umm no.:

Yes, that is my shallow comment for the month.

greatodinsraven

Haven't been able to see much due to the slowness, but a couple of thoughts...

1. I need to be able to pick a movie and say "rank others against this movie, and it stays on one side and other movies go through the other side while I continuously move the other movies either above or below that movie based on which I click.

2. I need to be able to begin by selecting a top 10 or 20 or however many I want movies and some favorite genres to give my list a jump start.

allauthors

@Simieski: I'm making a change to the matchup algorithm this weekend that'll make it smarter. But yeah, to do 250 movies, it would take a little while. It's meant as a fun diversion as WELL as a list-making site... it's not a business tool.

To us, the cool thing about it is that you can have a little idle fun ranking for 5 or 10 or 15 mins a day, and after a week or so you've got a decent list going.

It's worth noting that we have an iPhone app, too. Great way to pass the time while you're in line at the theater with friends.

Prophasi

@Fluffy654: I'm working on some of those issues this weekend (at least until we went into emergency OMG-server-is-igniting mode).

Because of the info we get as we go along, we don't have to make a bunch of dumb comparisons to get things decent. There's the transitivity we mentioned, which I'd venture to say almost always holds true for most people, as well as info we have on preferred genres, which movies are lower in the list than they should be, which movies are too HIGH in the list, etc.

So the algorithm tailors the matchups as it goes.

Prophasi

Sooooooo SLOW! And just doesn't make sense, would have to spend hours.

Simieski

@Prophasi:
Another problem I foresee is that a user will have to click hundreds of times just to get their top 20 list into a vaguely acceptable state. For example, to compare 7 movies with respect to each other, a user would have to make 720 comparisons.

Maybe a user should be able to add favourites on the list and reorder the list manually.

Fluffy654

@Fabrictramp: We're working on Netflix integration this weekend or next, actually. Glad to see another user who would like it.

Prior to this post, we had had about 40 simultaneous users, and the rankings were about as fast as you could click. It's not the posters -- it's more of a CPU thing at the moment. And I was just optimizing code for that when this article hit. Drat!

Prophasi

@Fluffy654: Another one is "Arghhh...Lifehacker's power is too great..."

Fabrictramp

Yeah, long term the speed will be a killer. If it's the movie posters that are slowing things down, how about an option to have a text-only version?

I've already added a couple of films to my Netflix queue that I haven't seen, so that's a plus. (Oh, an a button to let me do that would be super slick).

Fabrictramp

@Perseco: Haha. Yeah....definitely not how we intended the site to look.

Prophasi

[img189.imageshack.us]

Perseco

@Nollie: Glad you think so. Thanks for checking it out. :)

Prophasi

@Andy Hilal: Agreed. I'm one of the co-owners, and I can't even have any fun with the thing right now. :P

In normal times, the matchups are lightning fast. Of course....we might have to reevaluate "normal" now.

Prophasi

@abeworld: The list has to start at 0, so after the first ranking, it's a given you're going to have 2 movies in your Top 20 that you may very well hate. Just takes more rankings to bump them down.

Prophasi

@Prophasi: And yes, transitivity does of course get enforced on the site (A>B and B>C implies that A>C), since the results are linear. Any 1-D list would have the same issue, but it's more present because we make it explicit.

My plan since the beginning has been to spot those bits of "irrationality" in the data and call the user on it as a fun way of making them reevaluate. Just haven't gotten that far yet.

The slowness of the site is a decent psychological study, too. :(

Prophasi

@Fluffy654: Thanks :) The slowness is, ummm....pretty much a bucket of suck, I agree. This is by far the most users we've had concurrently before (maybe, oh, 10x?). That's the nature of the private beta, I suppose -- no hardcore trials by fire till now.

We'll be working on it, hardware and software.

Prophasi

@witeowl: Thanks for trying it out, anyway. From what we've seen, a lot of people react to the apples-to-oranges thing hostilely at first (you definitely get some wacky ones), but with a little usage it starts to feel more natural.

After all, every "greatest" movie list in the world has to involve those same choices implicitly -- the Godfather being above Airplane! means that it was judged to be better -- we just make the choice explicit.

Prophasi

@witeowl:

Totally agree. Apples to oranges. And way too slow.

What's the point of choosing a movie when they both end up in your Top 20?

Also, what if you don't like either movie?

I'm tempted to go just to give Equilibrium a terrible ranking.

RPR

There is an Easter Egg for Lifehackers. The message at the top will sometimes change to "I think Lifehacker readers are hot" :)

Fluffy654

There is absolutely nothing fun about a site that slow.

Andy Hilal

haha. I got an option to choose between 'Cruel intentions' and 'Epic movie' and I obviously had to choose the former. Now it stands as number 2 in my all time list where i wont choose it in top 300

WTF??!!

abeworld

@Fluffy654: There are some psychological studies that show that people are not logically consistent in their preferences. For example, a person will often have the following set:
A > B
B > C
C > A

If they are right then this might get a bit confused by our irrationality.

Fluffy654

Soooo sloowwww. If it speeds up then this will be great!

Fluffy654

Seems like a good way of killing time to me. Thanks for the sign-up link.

Nollie

Interesting idea, and thanks for the special sign-up, but I don't know how well this will work. There are too many apples-to-oranges comparisons. How can you say that a particular horror movie is better or worse than a particular comedy, for example? (I see a link to presumably filter by genre, but it doesn't seem to do anything for me...)

It's also a bit slow, which drives me crazy, but the foreign posters often chosen by their engine provides for comic relief. "Ron Burgundy: El Reportero"

witeowl

Interesting. I'll have to check this out.

Taylor Thurlow

@bestpersonintheunivers: Try talking to them sometime by asking whether Pulp Fiction or Empire is better. Or Die Hard vs. Aliens. Or Requiem For A Dream vs. Pi. You might be surprised how good the conversations are.

We've shown the iPhone site to friends at parties before who asked how it was going, and the conversation always moved quickly into the matchups rather than the site itself, and ended up getting near 10 people involved in arguing in little groups.

Most of those people were wrong, but hey. Can't always pick your friends.

Prophasi

I think I'll play around with this for a few hours, maybe I can get a page to load...

mcmachete

@Prophasi: Or you could just talk to your friends.

Great idea. The site is a little slow right now, but I'm sorting through all my favorites with ease.

shadows006

@meatee: I don't mind it so much, but it is a bit distracting in that they kind of look like mistakes.

Even though it's incredibly slow (not a big problem on a hangover day, my brain is moving at the same speed) I'm greatly enjoying the site.

It's a simple timewaster, yes - but it has the added benefit of reminding me of some old favourite movies that I haven't watched in years, and years.

...and of course, I'm now digging those movies out of the closet.

tali3sin

I'm enjoying it so far, and look forward to seeing some future integration with websites such as Facebook.

Azuen

@JuryDuty: It seems to me that the foreign posters are in there just to provide some variety, which I like, but some people (such as yourself) may find it confusing/distracting.

This site really is fun and I think the ranking system works well. The two main problems I see are:

1. Sometimes movie posters don't come up or are wrong. They had no poster for Gone with the Wind and the Live Free or Die Hard poster was in Chinese.

2. It's SOOOOOOOOOOOO slow. When you're rating, you want to go fast. It's taking a good 15-30 seconds between loads (this might be the Lifehacker effect).

That said, they resolve these issues and it could be pretty stellar. Then, I think, they should expand the system to include other medias such as video games, books, celebrities, etc.

I've rated nearly 400 movies so far, and my top 20 (for the most part) does not represent my real-world top 20.

The fundamental flaws in the system are that the ranking gives weight to the order in which the movies were rated, and when you rate another movie as better than one of the movies in your list already, it is automatically given that movie's spot in the list. So, since V for Vendetta was one of the first movies I rated, it sits at #6, and since I later on rated Gone Baby Gone as better than V for Vendetta, Gone Baby Gone is now at #5. Both of these movies are far from being in my real-world top 20.

There needs to be some type of algorithm in place to correct this, and I'm far from being genius enough to come up with it.

Lol I was just asked to compare planet of the apes to hotel rwanda.

Wow, quite a bit of negativity about this. Sure the loading time is frustrating but it's by no means rendering the site unusable (although I don't know how bad it was when this article first hit).

Regarding the way the rating system works, personally I like it. I remember when IMDB's rating system made sense but these days when a new film hits people just vote it 10 without a thought (Dark Knight, Watchmen). At least in this rating system it forces you to compare it against something, even if the comparison is Toy Story vs Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back ;)

b0ring

Soo good, despite the lifehacker overwhelm, favorite quote for the moment,
"Who says you can't run a movie site on dial-up?"

The creators for sure have a good sense of humor that makes the lag quite bearable. From the comments to posts here as well as the blog it really looks like they're in for the long haul, as well as constant updates. We're just catching the site at the beginning.

I'd agree with allauthors and that thread/ideas comment post, and it looks like you're on it.

I'm very excited for the possibilities of flickchart. Good luck guys.

benjaminthomas

@Fluffy654: I doubt it, I've been using it for a while heard about it from my buddies over at Random chatter on their movie chatter podcast long ago. It has always been slow. It used to be where I could only get in about half of my clicks to register without recieving a timeout or "our servers are melting" message.

daybringer

How do you delete movies you mistakenly ranked?

tonynyc

This does seem quite nice, must give it look later.

[i]test[/i]

One problem with this type of "sorting"-based rating system is nontransitivity.

That is, just because I prefer movie A to movie B and movie B to movie C doesn't mean I prefer movie A to movie C. (Of course this is the simplest example; the cycle could be much longer).

In practice you'll find that people have these nontransitive beliefs all the time, and it's going to prevent this from working well.

czarandy

@tonynyc: We didn't have an easy functionality for this early on, but we added it last night.

If you rank a movie accidentally and either haven't seen it or hate it, go to the movie's info page (you can click on the movie in your list or do a site search) and click the Remove From My List link at the top. Outta there it goes.

Prophasi

@czarandy: Actually, that's not a problem in our rating system any more than it is in any list, all of which produce a linear order with implied transitivity, so it's interesting to me that we've had so many people make comments similar to yours.

What we do is make explicit the choices that every list assumes, i.e. that #5 is better than every movie below it. Our thought is that the accuracy's greater because you're stopping and considering, based probably more on subjective feeling of the moment than of seeing lots of illustrious movies in your list. The results will probably be more personal.

It could be said that our method *increases* instances of transitivity violation, because of a higher tendency to feelings of the moment. (I still find my list to be consistent, and any cycles to be the exception.)

If that's the case, though, it's not a problem at all. The latest decision is the one we go with, meaning that it overrides previous choices. It more accurately reflects "the now."

Prophasi