Simple theory of IMDB bias

taw

IMDB top 250 list is dominated by old movies, which conflicts with my perception (shared by majority of people as far as I can tell) that new movies are far better than old movies (comparing either top with top or average with average).

I have a simple theory why IMDB is wrong:

For new movies, very wide population have seen it, many not fans of the genre. They vote on IMDB soon after watching.
For old movies, only narrow population of fans have seen it recently. The only people who vote on IMDB are those who've seen it recently (atypical fans), or have particularly good memories of it (atypical fans again). People who watched an old movie ages ago but don't remember much about it are very unlikely to vote on IMDB.
Therefore it's much more difficult for a new movie to get a good IMDB score than it is for an old movie.
Therefore a new movie with identical IMDB store is likely much better than an old movie with identical score.

The "correct" procedure would of course be gathering random sample of people, showing them random movies, and asking for ratings just after the movie. For practical reasons this cannot really be done, so the next best thing we can do is ignoring old movies with unreasonably high IMDB scores.

I have a simple theory why IMDB is wrong:

For new movies, very wide population have seen it, many not fans of the genre. They vote on IMDB soon after watching.
For old movies, only narrow population of fans have seen it recently. The only people who vote on IMDB are those who've seen it recently (atypical fans), or have particularly good memories of it (atypical fans again). People who watched an old movie ages ago but don't remember much about it are very unlikely to vote on IMDB.
Therefore it's much more difficult for a new movie to get a good IMDB score than it is for an old movie.
Therefore a new movie with identical IMDB store is likely much better than an old movie with identical score.

There are substantially more movies recently, eyeballing it it looks like about 150 thousand movies were made in the most recent 12 years of the chart, compared to about 350 thousand made in previous years total. That would imply that recent movies are underrepresented very slightly. Removing short films might smooth that slightly, but actually these numbers are about right.

Upvoted for doing the research. Woo null hypothesis!

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Simple theory of IMDB bias

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Simple theory of IMDB bias

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