The Joy of Ignoring Ratings.

Taste can only be developed when your own opinion matters more than the mob's opinion.

The first thing I do when considering what piece of media to start consuming is to search for others’ opinions on it. IMDB makes this very easy and convenient, conferring a score from 1 to 10 to any given show or movie. The same can be said for books on Goodreads. This is something I’ve been doing unconsciously ever since I was a teenager, driven by a desire to be efficient and not waste time with things that would be “beneath” me. More recently, I’ve identified this same pattern when watching YouTube videos. The first thing I will instinctively do is scroll right to the comments to see what the feedback is and what the key moments of the video are. This is such an automatic behavior that it’s easy to forget what’s actually going on. I’m fundamentally relinquishing my opinion, taste, and preferences in deference to the consensus opinion, measured via “likes.”

You could make the argument that it is impossible to escape this recommendation phenomenon. Even going to a bookshop is looking at a curation of literature that others have assembled for you, and because it is virtually impossible to escape the fact that what you consume is heavily dependent on others’ opinions, you have permission to not care about it. But not all curations are created equally. A bookshop allows, to a large degree, for your personal intuition and taste to shine through and help you make a choice that, on the other end of the spectrum, the TikTok algorithm quite simply leaves no room for.

Consensus-based living

This becomes a problem specifically when all of your media and entertainment consumption comes from platforms that use an algorithm to recommend things to you. If all the shows you watch come from Netflix recommendations, all the news you view comes from the same channel, and all the opinions you are exposed to come from the same “corner” of Instagram, then your worldview and opinions will be molded entirely by large companies that could only care about making a profit.

You never learn what you actually like. Taste is a muscle. Like any muscle, it atrophies when unused.

When you always check a movie’s rating first, you never develop the internal sense of what appeals to you specifically. You instead learn to like what you’re supposed to like. You can recognize “objectively good” content: the 8.5 on IMDB, the best-selling book, or the 5-star rated restaurant, but you never learn whether you personally connect with it.

There’s a difference between these two modes of appreciation. One is consensus-based: “This is good because everyone agrees it’s good.” The other is personal: “This resonates with me in a way I can’t fully explain.”

The first mode is safe. If someone asks what you thought of the movie, you can point to the 8.5 rating and say, “It was great. It was nominated for x Oscars.” You’re protected by the mainstream opinion.

The second mode is vulnerable. If you love something rated 6.2, you have to defend and justify yourself.

When you operate in consensus mode, you lose your intuition and the possibility of finding something you truly love in ways that makes no sense to everyone else.

The best game I’ve ever played never made it to any top 10 games of all time list. I was lucky enough to be born in an age where you could go to a shop and choose random games based on how the back of the cover looked.

Shoutout, Sly Cooper 2

In today’s age, I might have never given it a shot.

And more than missing individual works, I would have missed the process of discovering what my taste actually is.

The funny thing is that the consequences of picking a bad movie or book aren’t even that bad.

Every bad choice teaches you something. Every time you pick something that doesn’t work, you learn a little more about what does.

If you keep going with algorithm’s and other’s opinions then you’re experiencing culture as a tourist, never wandering off the marked path. You’re seeing what everyone sees, thinking what everyone thinks, and bit by bit, you forget how to like things for yourself.

So stop checking the ratings first.

Pick something that intrigues you and see what happens.

Tiago Hoshi,

Paths of Meaning