Your answer on Quora is good in terms of interrogating the IMDB scores, but I still pay said scores no heed. However, that is just me.

My main issue is with using an IMDB score (or Rotten Tomatoes score, etc) in the context of a film review as an argument to watch it. I have less of an issue if you are a viewer simply looking for something to watch. Though as I said, I still wouldn't look at it personally.

I'll concede my own decision making process for viewing a film isn't really comparable to most people since: 1) I have a vast pre-internet knowledge of film history built up from years of academic study and dedicated viewing. 2) For decades, I've been a commited cinemagoer, attending screenings at least two or three times a week, so my knowledge of cinema from the 1980s onward is fairly rock solid, on top of the aforementioned study of cinema history. 3) As a fiction writer, I don't mind seeing "bad" films, as the study of failure is arguably more instructive than the study of success. Indeed, I'd argue the true metric of what constitutes a film buff has more to do with how many bad films one has seen, as opposed to good. 4) As to how I decide what to see (contrary to popular belief, I don't see everything these days), that's a mixture of what I know is in production, the personnel involved, and if choices must be made between one or another, then I consult a couple of trusted critics (with awareness of their personal biases and prejudices, taking into account that I sometimes disagree with them) for verbal arguments (not aggregator scores). Failing all of that, I simply go by what I'd prefer to see on any given day. I don't really value one genre over another, so mood as much as anything can be a deciding factor. :)