I don’t think it’s obvious that people voting on old movies haven’t seen new movies.
It might be likely that people who watch many old movies are less likely to have seen new movies, but it could just be that these people watch more movies in general.
It’s obvious not because of any character trait that those people have, but because the majority of the voting on those movies was done before the new movies came out.
I was going to say that this is likely more true for movies coming out in 2011 than 2000, which I still believe somewhat, but cursory research indicates that imdb was started in 1990 and acquired by amazon in 1998, so even in the year 2000 imdb was fairly large, and therefore probably had reasonable traffic.
When I thought about older movies I thought about movies from the ’50s and ‘60s especially, where all of the reviews necessarily came out long before the movies were released, rather than movies from the ’90s, where the effect you mention should be pretty strong.
So my new hypothesis in your vein would be that ’90s movies should be over-represented compared with ’00s movies.
Null hypothesis from the data I’ve referenced in my other comments: approximately 37 movies from the ’90s.
Actual data: 40 movies from the 1990s in the top 250. So signs point to movie quality being essentially constant across time (at least on the decade level of granularity. I’ll take another look at specifically 1998-2003; the five years after being acquired by amazon in which presumably the site had the most traffic, but I feel like I’m privileging the hypothesis here.)
I don’t think it’s obvious that people voting on old movies haven’t seen new movies.
It might be likely that people who watch many old movies are less likely to have seen new movies, but it could just be that these people watch more movies in general.
It’s obvious not because of any character trait that those people have, but because the majority of the voting on those movies was done before the new movies came out.
I was going to say that this is likely more true for movies coming out in 2011 than 2000, which I still believe somewhat, but cursory research indicates that imdb was started in 1990 and acquired by amazon in 1998, so even in the year 2000 imdb was fairly large, and therefore probably had reasonable traffic.
When I thought about older movies I thought about movies from the ’50s and ‘60s especially, where all of the reviews necessarily came out long before the movies were released, rather than movies from the ’90s, where the effect you mention should be pretty strong.
So my new hypothesis in your vein would be that ’90s movies should be over-represented compared with ’00s movies.
Null hypothesis from the data I’ve referenced in my other comments: approximately 37 movies from the ’90s.
Actual data: 40 movies from the 1990s in the top 250. So signs point to movie quality being essentially constant across time (at least on the decade level of granularity. I’ll take another look at specifically 1998-2003; the five years after being acquired by amazon in which presumably the site had the most traffic, but I feel like I’m privileging the hypothesis here.)
6 from 1998, 6 from 1999, 5 from 2000, basically exactly what I’d expect, nothing super high.