The Star Rating Problem
Every movie lover has faced it: you open a ranking app, see a movie you love, and try to give it a rating. 4 stars? 4.5? You end up paralyzed by a deceptively hard question — not "how good is this movie?" but "how good is this movie compared to everything else I've seen?"
That's the core problem I set out to solve when I built Montir, a movie ranking iOS app. Star ratings feel precise but they're actually pretty arbitrary. You might give Inception 5 stars on Monday and realize on Thursday you'd rate The Shining the same — but you definitely don't think they're equal films.
The insight that changed everything: humans are much better at pairwise comparisons than absolute ratings. It's easier to answer "is Parasite better than Interstellar?" than "what exact score out of 10 does Parasite deserve?"
The ELO Solution
