IMDB's rating system is killing the indies

That and look at the reviews, which tend to be more useful than ratings (although not for Evil Dead, apparently).

Shawshank, top on the top 250, only has 58% of votes being 10. When I see some of these with 90% of votes being 10's, I know it's not yet time to consider the user ratings. I would think someone in the biz, and only looking at the rating, is not very good at his/her job (and, probably not too successful).

"it works poorly for films in limited release with relatively few votes."

And yet they display the numbers anyway. Does that make sense to anyone?

There ought to be an additional user-dependent rating, where only the votes of those other users who most closely match your own ratings (if any) are taken into account.

I find I'm in disagreement with the top 1000 voters, and the people who vote on popular films, pretty much all the time.

(sorry if this appears twice... I think it ate my previous comment)

There's a "view more comments" link as it only displays the last two.

Randy wrote: "There ought to be an additional user-dependent rating, where only the votes of those other users who most closely match your own ratings (if any) are taken into account."

If another user makes their ratings profile page public, IMDb will allow you to see how correlated their ratings are to yours by looking at their profile page. For instance:
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1000000/ Col Needham's (IMDb CEO) page
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur0127678/ My profile page

If/when you find someone who generally agrees with you (+60 or better), you can look at their ratings page to see how well they rate films you are considering.

The IMDb ratings are nothing more and nothing less than the aggregate ratings of people who have accounts on the IMDb. It is probably not representative of the views of the population as a whole nor does it reflect any serious critical assessment of the quality of a film. It is at best a qualitative measure of populist film preferences and at worst entirely misleading. It is highly inappropriate to use the IMDb ratings as a means to assess independent or hobbyist films.

Consider these inherent shortcomings:
1. The IMDb poll is a self selected survey. Self selected surveys are inherently flawed and statistically unsound.
2. Not everyone provides their ages and gender when registering for an account. No one can say with certainty that people provide correct demographic information.
3. Assuming that people provide accurate demographic information, the underlying population of the IMDb membership is not representative of the general population or may not be representative of the population of the film going population. People with accounts on the IMDb are predominately males between the ages of 18 and 29 who live in the United States.
4. Comparing the ratings of any two films are at best problematic since the populations rating each film may have very little overlap. Since this is a self selection survey sampling methodologies cannot be used to make that comparison.
5. There are significantly more votes for recent and heavily publicized films.
6. Initial ratings for recently released films tend to be much higher reflecting the perspective of the film’s fan base and declines in time. For instance, Avatar had a rating of 9.03, a weighted rating of 8.95 and a rank of 21 on 21 December 2009. It now has a rating of 7.98, a weighted rating of 7.92 and is no longer in the IMDb Top 250.
7. The methods that IMDb uses to reduce voting fraud generally do not work well for films with few votes.