Hi all! Thought this may be the right audience for this - I wrote a little blog post on my reasoning behind adopting a practice of rating everything on a 1-100 scale.
Personally, without Criticker I would have no way of keeping track of the films I watch and the scores I choose to assign them. It allows me the chance to go in depth with the score a little more than a standard out of 5 or 10.
Hi, I'm a bit of a statistics enthusiast, and I agree. 100 options is better for the clumping issues you mention, but in my own research, I found that people only substantially make use of about 40 options at the most. But, the good news is that there's no downside to having a lot of unused space in a rating scheme, and almost all people are more comfortable using a scale that goes to 1, 10, 100, etc.
Also, I recently conducted a huge review of my own ratings, and cross-examined it with hundreds of other data points, and I found that the PSI was by far the best single predictor of what my eventual rating would be (explains 49% of variance). The average IMDB rating and RT scores were able to get 35%. Metacritic scores were actually the lowest, with 32%. So that conflicts with your estimation - though I too initially held that instinct that Metacritic was the best. I was however, using some stats mojo, able to concoct an algorithm that brought the figure to 58% by using all the data I had available to me.
However, the most powerful use of Criticker by far is the ability to sort all films by PSI, and then parse that list by genre or collections. If you want to see the most-recommended time travel movie you haven't seen, you can get that in a few clicks. I'm sure this feature is underused, as it's not exactly obvious that it's there when you first use the site.
If I'm being honest though, I have an extremely eclectic method for deciding what to watch, which usually comes to down to whatever random whim I am feeling and what films are left to see from directors, genre lists, etc. It's rarely much of a concern as to whether the film will be good, so I don't consult PSI or critical ratings. As I've gotten older I've found it really doesn't matter all that much if the film is bad. It happens, and it's almost always still somewhat enjoyable just to watch a film.
