Sandeep’s New Rating System

September 17th, 2008 admin Posted in Friends, Reviews |

Sandeep Somani came up with this scheme of rating TV shows, movies, plays etc. It takes away the relative interpretation and quantization associated with stars, and instead gets to the meat of the matter with an absolute measure in terms of the dollar value you are willing to pay to see the show/movie etc. To add to your ability to express your dissatisfaction you may also choose to quote how much money you will need to be paid, to go see the show. For example, if you hate a show, but your wife wants you to go see it again, she’d have to pay you some amount of money before you will budge. A third innovation of this scheme (other than the abslouteness of a dollar value it allows and the negative dollar value it allows) is the ability to express “repeat potential” by saying how the dollar value you rate it at changes with each extra viewing. The rating allows changes based on “viewing format” (DVD vs movie hall vs TV) and “control potential” (access to the remote control to allow fast forwarding through non-sensical song sequences improves the rating a bit) . I buy it. A dollar value does make it a little bit harder to average across a collection of ratings, unless the number of reviews is large, because the absoluteness of the measure can be significantly skewed by what people consider a “normal” show should cost. That said, the dollar vlaue reveals a lot about the reviewer and what is being reviewed in a certain independent fashion, without being tied to a normalized scale. Could be an interesting experiment. Below is the explanation of the scheme in Sandeep’s own words.

“So, the idea is that rather than give a rating of good, bad, hopeless, etc., quote a dollar amount you would be willing to pay to watch a certain movie, play etc. given that the alternative is to watch a random sitcom on TV (like what i am doing right now ! )

Some examples  - You could say,
I’ll pay upto $100 to watch     O for the first time
…           $40    …        O for the second time
…           $60     …        spamalot for the first time
…           $20     …        spamalot for the second time
…           $60     …        sheer madness for the first time

for something more familiar (note the negative)
I’ll pay upto  -$50     …       taare zameen par for the first time in theatre
…                   - $10    …       taare zameen par for the first time on DVD with full access to remote
…                   - $40     …      taare zameen par for the first time on DVD with no access to remote
…                   - $100    …     taare zameen par for the second time anyhow 

Negative amount means you will have to pay me to watch this (this may be substituted by equivalent beverage servings)
So you see, this system is much more flexible and informative than the normal yahoo rating.”