Everyone's a Critic
Everyone's a Critic (EaC) was a film community website. It began as an experiment using a collaborative filtering algorithm to obtain film recommendations from people who share similar tastes in film. Over time, this recommendation system website grew into an internet community of cinephiles, critics and reviewers.
History[edit]
In 2002 Dan Seidner, a software developer from suburban Philadelphia, created a website where people could get film recommendations from other people who share their tastes in movies. Site members (hereforth referred to as critics) grade movies and get a list of all other critics from the site, in order of how close individual ratings are to theirs. From there, a critic can look through their closest critic's ratings to get film recommendations.
By clicking on the name of critics closest to your film tastes, you get a list of the movies they've seen that you haven't; in order from their highest rated films, down to the lowest rated. This method allows critics to not only use recommendations for what movies to go see, also what movies to avoid seeing.
EaC has evolved from a place to get film recommendations, to a community of film critics and cinephiles who write in-depth reviews, participate in film discussion, polls, contests and games. EaC has grown to over 2,900 critics, over 900,000 film ratings, over 19,000 film reviews, and over 170,000 films in the database.
Grading films[edit]
EaC critics grade films using a scale similar to United States School Systems. A+ at the top of the scale and F at the bottom. The average ratings of the community generally fall between C+ and B−.
Critics can also give films Anticipation Ratings before the films are released. These grades are on a scale of 1 to 5. Rating an upcoming film a 5 represents a high expectation and excitement level, while a rating of 1 represents the opposite. Critics can view a list of upcoming films in order of the community's anticipation for the release of those films.