I'm pretty sure stars were discontinued because the best proxy for "what you will spend time watching, is what you spent time watching" and not your curated ratings. As in: the datapoint they funneled into their models was "time spent on video X" and not, "rating on video X".
Business of course wants to keep churn low, and they think time spent on the site is the best way to do that.
That (and "people mostly don't use ratings beside 1 and 5") is at least the reasoning I've read every time I've seen this topic mentioned in blogs/talks.
I do also feel Netflix is pushing it's in-house content way more these last few years, to the detriment of their recommendations though.
Business of course wants to keep churn low, and they think time spent on the site is the best way to do that.
That (and "people mostly don't use ratings beside 1 and 5") is at least the reasoning I've read every time I've seen this topic mentioned in blogs/talks.
I do also feel Netflix is pushing it's in-house content way more these last few years, to the detriment of their recommendations though.