While Letterboxd, IMDb, and its like have been around for decades, there are many like me who are still apprehensive about the star rating system. By rolling out FilmX, a first of its kind online platform that offers users a fresh (albeit unorthodox) method of rating/ranking films, Terence-Hari Fernandes hopes to switch up the way we consume and appreciate cinema for good.
Here is a brief interview with Fernandes. He offers insight about FilmX (currently in prototype stage) and the changes it could bring to the film rating system.
*Note: this interview has been edited for clarity.
Vidal Dcosta for The Movie Buff: Unlike Letterboxd or other film list/ranking platforms, FilmX takes an unorthodox route and isn’t dependent on traditional star ratings. Could you elaborate on this decision to stray from the ‘tradition’ and how this sets FilmX apart from its competitors?
Terence-Hari Fernandes: Traditional film rating systems are broken. As the Internet has evolved over the last decade, we’ve seen ratings and reviews lose meaning. [This is] by media companies who wish to influence the perception of a particular film for good or bad. More so the traditional rating system gives us no ability to truly express ourselves. The weighted average of a films ratings doesn’t accurately express how people feel. It usually all boils down to the tyranny of the majority and drowns out the voices at the extremes.
With FilmX we wanted to introduce a new mechanism that could help us circumvent this. It wasn’t enough for a new platform to simply request its users to be more thoughtful or fair. When we learned about Quadratic Voting we had found a radical mechanism that made people rate options based on the intensity of their desire to see a specific outcome prevail. We went a step further and abstracted the premise Quadratic Voting into an infinite game. Instead of being a one-time vote on a pre-defined set of options, it was now a constantly evolving frame for your choices to be expressed and change over time.
We hope this new mechanism will allow users to feel differently about rating films and not just be another rabbit hole that parasitically feeds on your attention and time online and auctions it off to the highest bidder.
What are some hurdles you faced while creating FilmX, or while bringing this unique concept to fruition to the public?
TF: Quadratic Voting is a fairly recent concept in the world of online voting. That being said, the few iterations that existed online were all built to serve the original paradigm of Quadratic Voting, which is a limited pre-defined set of options and a limited budget of points to be spent in a limited time. For us the biggest challenge was trying to abstract and adapt the original intention of Quadratic Voting—which was a finite exercise into an infinite game. The challenges came about when it came to designing the math used under the hood to power the platform. This was as well as abstracting it such that it was actually usable by a layperson who would know nothing about Quadratic Voting, but knew how they felt about the films they loved.
I’m still new to FilmX.Could you help me and our readers understand the quadratic point ranking system on the platform?
TF: Absolutely! The idea takes a second to wrap one’s head around but s simple really. Traditional film rating platforms give you, for example, ten points for every film you choose to rate. This makes each film a fresh expedition of rating. Which isn’t accurate. Subjectively speaking you don’t judge two different films in a vacuum. You compare them. But you can’t express that comparison effectively with those systems.
With that context you can see the system of voting on FilmX gives you only a limited budget of 100 points to spend on adding a film to your list. Now, this influences your thought process. What films are you actually willing to spend your points on? Those will, obviously, be the films you intensely like. Additionally, there’s a catch: the points you spend increase quadratically. What this means is that if you spend one point on a film it cost just that, 1. However, if you feel more intensely about a specific film over another film it will cost more. If you spend 2 points it will cost 4, if you spend 3 it will cost 9.
The cost of spending points is the square of the points themselves and therefore rises quadratically. Why is this, though? The idea is that instead of simply giving things an arbitrarily high rating you must really consider how you really feel about that specific film compared to the other films you love. The fact that there is a cost to expressing yourself turns a simple film rating exercise into one of meaningful communication with yourself and the people around you.
Are there plans on incorporating a feature for users to leave brief movie reviews as well?
TF: Brief movie reviews are definitely a planned feature. The initially build of FilmX doesn’t include it because we wanted to know if people would take to the Intensity Voting system in the first place. We’re still gathering user experience data and feedback on the same but all in all it’s looking good so far. Though, we definitely want to add the ability for users to express themselves even more about the choices they’ve made.
As a follow up to the previous question, are there any more features that are yet to come? What features are currently in development that users can look forward to in the future?
TF: We have a fair few features we hope to bring to FilmX in the near future! Brief movie reviews, adding other users’ lists to your profile so you can discover what they love, [and]the ability to discover the top films across the platform. A feature we’re excited about but is in a very nascent stage is quest-based Lists. Sadly, I can’t talk about that last one too much.
While we’ve come to the end of this interview, you can still go check out FilmX for yourselves at this link (and don’t forget to share your film lists with fellow cinephiles!): https://filmx.lekhhaq.com/
More details about the platform here: https://terenceharifernandes.substack.com/p/a-new-approach-to-rating-films?r=reqnx&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
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