the common sentiment surrounding my anime list ratings
is that they're just about completely useless because everything over a 7.5
is amazing while everything under a 6.5 is unwatchable
so i found myself extremely curious on just how mal arrives at these numbers
so i made a spreadsheet and inputted mal's rating formula so i can run some
simulations of my own do my controversial hot takes drag down the
score of otherwise loved shows does the lowest anime ever made deserve
a 1.9 let's figure out once and for all if we should put any stock
into that beautiful grey number
Yahallo and welcome back to Kinda Neet
before we begin i want to make one thing
clear there is nothing wrong with liking any anime regardless of its score
or what other people think of it your opinion is the only one that matters
unless of course we're talking about sao in which case you're wrong
for me half the fun of watching anime is figuring out where it fits into my
rating system and i just use that little grey number
as a tool to decide what to watch next to begin our journey through a certain
scientific spreadsheet i want to figure out which loved anime
that i gave the lowest score not surprisingly my taste actually
aligned pretty closely with the general consensus
because we're all sheep and nobody's unique regardless of what your third
grade teacher told you but there were a few outliers
so i'm about to expose myself for science
no susan not like that i'm about to expose my most controversial opinions
for the whole world to see so please don't hate me for giving the
promise neverland a four but even if i were a troll and
gave it a one out of ten would that have any
effect on the overall score to answer that question first we need to
understand how mal scores work to generate that beautiful gray number
the robots divide the total number of users who
so i just realized how boring this probably sounds to most people but
the tldr is that the final score is not only affected by the average user rating
but also how many ratings the show has and how it compares to the site-wide
average which is currently a 6.73 but hang on shouldn't the average across
all anime be closer to a 5 not necessarily mali uses a score of 1-10
not 0-10 which means an average score
would actually be a 5.5 but psychologically we all assume five
is the halfway point so that partially explains why the
entire site seems to be skewed too high technically we have four negative
choices one neutral choice and five positive options the other
reason the scores tend to skew so high is because mal does not take ratings
into account unless the user has completed at least 20 percent of the
show so if it's a 1 out of 10 bad it
shouldn't take you three episodes to figure that out
so the vast majority of negative reviews don't even count
and rightfully so you can't rate an entire show based on just watching the
op unless of course it's tower of
god basically the further away from the site-wide average you get
the harder it is to continue moving in that direction like an elastic band
getting pulled tighter and tighter but back to the matter at hand do trolls
rating good shows 1 and bad shows 10 make any difference to
the final score using the lowest rated anime ever made
i've accurately plotted out how many of each ratings it received
including all the clowns who gave it a perfect score
and as you can see the formula is just about spot
on within a rounding error if i stretch my imagination
i could see someone with really trash taste giving it a five
so what happens if we remove all of the positive reviews
not surprisingly the score only dropped by .5
which i think is safe to say won't change anyone's mind on whether they
watch it or not so unless there's a ridiculous number of
fake users boosting it up the final score really shouldn't be
swayed too much and vice versa for review bombing good shows
speaking of which currently the highest rated anime of all
time is full metal alchemist brotherhood but it only has a measly 9.2 pathetic
so hypothetically would it be possible to make an anime
so well written with such beautiful art and enticing characters that it captures
the heart of every anime fan in the world that earns itself a perfect
10 absolutely not it would take 65 300 perfect scores for a show to achieve
a 10 out of 10 any less or any reviews other than a 10
and it drops to a 9.99 although sort of counter-intuitive this
actually makes a lot of sense it stops people from listing their anime
on the site and then using fake accounts to make it temporarily the highest rated
show of all time with 100 perfect scores your anime will
still only receive an 8.35 slightly above average and obviously the
same is true for the inverse the lowest you could intentionally drop
a show to using 100 fake accounts is a 3.85 so i don't know about you
but to me the way male formulates their scores actually seems like a pretty
accurate representation of the way the community feels about the anime as a
whole and you should feel totally confident in
using the score to gauge how likely you are to enjoy a show
but there are a few biases you should keep in mind unless someone really
picked up sequels will just about always have a
higher score than the original because the only people who watch season 2
are those who enjoyed the first season so it acts as a shield
protecting it from reviewers with different tastes second
new shows tend to be rated higher than old ones this is simply due to the
demographic watching seasonal anime and the sheer lack of total reviews as
you can see seasonal anime scores tend to slowly
decrease with time and that's why they just about all have
a 7.5 i'm sorry but no bad stop lastly
and this is where things really fall apart let's say 100 people rated a show
if half of them give it a 10 out of 10 and the other half give
it a 1 out of 10 mao will assign this show a score of 6.1
which is the exact same score it would be given if all 100 people gave it a
perfectly average 5.5 in the first scenario there's a 50
chance that you would absolutely love the anime and also a 50 chance that
you'd hate it but in the second scenario assuming your
tastes align with the masses which they do there's a 100
chance that you'll find the anime to be so so so
i'd much rather risk it for the biscuit and watch the more controversial option
that's why it can also be a useful tool to navigate over to the stats page
and sneak a peek at the actual distribution of ratings
the complaint that every single anime on the site is rated way too high
somewhere between a six and a nine is actually just confirmation bias at work
if you look at the distribution across the entire site
there is an equal number of fours as there are eights
and far fewer nines than there are twos and threes
you just happen to only be checking scores for shows that you've been
recommended in some form and past that only shows that pique your
interest narrowing your search to only higher rated shows
so yeah just about everything watchable on my anime list
does lie between a 5 and a 9 but that's exactly how it should be
because nobody has any business unironically watching through a 2 out of
10 like striking daughter in its entirety
unless of course you're making a youtube video about it like i've done
right here on this channel and also make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out
on any of my future spreadsheets i guess
i found myself extremely curious