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Hey Guys, Long Time No See...
It's been a while since I have last published a blog here, much less one that wasn't a First Reads. Life has been... oddly smoother than expected, which both relieves and frightens me. Regardless, we can save existentialism for later, today I want to talk about why I stopped giving my book "reviews" ratings, and my thoughts on ratings & rankings as a whole.
For those that have been keeping up with my book reviews called First Reads on Goodreads (the platform, not a book) you may recognize that I had ratings of certain books up until the last few books. I believe I tried to get rid of them, but that would risk me deleting the written review, and I for one, don't want to do them, nor I am willing to go through the process of that any longer. Plus, there are some early book reviews exclusive to that platform.
All of this brings into question, why did I stop rating reviews? To put it simply, because I can't trust my own ratings. On top of that, rarely do we find ratings that are based on defined criteria. Are all products rated the same equal in quality? If ratings are a good marker for how we recommending products, then why are they equally clowned upon?
Today, I'm gonna share my uninformed and very subjective opinion ratings & rankings. It'll be split up into multiple sections, each discussing a different reasoning for my opinion. Hopefully by the end of this, you may just learn something out of a person who can write competently yet is incompetent at English coherence.
Section 1: How do you Define a Rating?
Lets face it, we're all biased. We try to make unbiased decisions, but practically everything we do is fueled off of our preconceived notions of the world, as well as what we are shown. To illustrate this, I will borrow an example I heard a while ago (forget where though, unfortunately) that illustrates this concept:
You are a news reporter looking into a tragic event. Lets say its a tornado disaster as an example. You arrive at the town to film and report, but news always gives limited time for this event to air. What do you cover? You could talk to the residents affected, or the city officials on their response. You could focus on the tragedy of it all, or you can lean on the economical side of things. Do you appeal to emotion, or do you try to maintain a neutral tone?
With limited time in our lives, its difficult to cover all our bases. The choices you make affect what you present to the public, and those choices were based on how you were raised. So with that in mind, you could see why I don't really trust ratings. If we were to look at the individual reviews, their quality can vary from in-depth analysis that explains their criteria to joke reviews, nonsensical garble, and shallow one sentence reviews. On the other hand, while looking at the big picture may be better, it still may not be accurate. In video game reviews, you can often find a divide between professional, news publication level reviewers, the more humble, diverse, and smaller independent reviewers, and the masses of the rest of the public, with their wide range of opinions. Each of these groups will at least have slightly differing opinions on a product, as well as their outliers, criteria, etc. Lets not forget that each individual from these groups have a different background.
Section 2: 7/10 is the New Average
I am often in the video-game space, so I see this often. Notice how much gaming news publications like IGN give so many games 7s, 8s, 9s. Public reviews are often as guilty of this. There are exceptions, yes. Metacritic allows rankings from 0-100, allowing for more mixed reception to have their place. However, the fact stands. In my point of view, games are either 9/10s or somewhere around it, or low 2-3s. There doesn't seem to be an in-between.
If the extremes are getting more extreme, than shouldn't we modify our criteria to affect that? Like if most apps on the app store are 4 stars, wouldn't it make sense to make the quality of the four star the qualities of a 3 star. To put it into another perspective, if 4/5s what we see the most, then shouldn't 4/5 be the new average? If the bar for quality keeps getting higher, than so should the bar for being average.
I like to think it makes sense. When was the last time you bought a product that had lower than 4 star ratings? Ask yourself truthfully, would you buy a product that was a 6/10 or 3 stars out of 5? Most people wouldn't, they would prefer alternatives with higher ratings. More people should be buying these average-rated products, but more people are choosing to think that 4 stars or 7/10s are the baseline for satisfaction, everything else being bad. If that is the case, then our ratings of products need to go down across to board to reflect the general opinion, the opinion of what is worth of being bought
Section 3: The Internet can Lie?
This one will be relatively short, but as alluded to with joke reviews and nonsensical sentences, the Internet isn't exactly the best the best place to get your facts straight. It's double-edged, with one side of the internet having the most up-to-date, accurate information possible from a wide array of experts willing to talk, and the other side is drowned in misinformation, half-truths, and a bunch of bias.
Going back to video games, if you were to look at a platform like Steam, what can you gather based off of Steam reviews? Perhaps a lot, but you also have to concede that for a lot of reviews, they are either trolling, or very simplistic, like, "10/10 would recommend to play with friends. fun party game". That doesn't give you much information on what the game is like and whether it is for you (plus, Steam doesn't even have a mediocre rating that people can choose in their reviews).
Section 4: Chasing Satisfaction
In a past First Reads blog, I took a look at the book Stumbling on Happiness. The book didn't want to teach me how to be happy, rather it taught me why I may not be happy. In a way, it was a reverse psychology medicine. Well, it may not have helped me prevent the fallacies I make in trying to be happy, but it certainly made me aware of them, and in a way it made me more content with life. (I will say that I may have forgotten what the book covered, hence First Reads. I really need to reread this).
The author did give one piece of advice in pursuing happiness near the end of the book. If you want to be happy in what your doing, ask others how they feel doing what you want to do. Despite what I said beforehand, other peoples opinions can enrich your life. A lot of reviewers have ditched number ratings for more binary scaling like "to recommend or not recommend", or ditched any rating system and just leave the conclusion. Do I find this preferable to ratings?
Actually, I don't really know. Rating systems have the disadvantage of people not reading the full review and just looking at the score. For reviews that don't have them, I still skip to the conclusion to get a (flawed) idea of what a person's opinion on something is. All of this may just be a me problem.
Life isn't simple, nor does the world revolve around an individual. Rating systems may be not be bad on its own, but in the presence of others, it can be extrapolated to be out of context or make ill-informed decisions. For me, if ratings can have all of these flaws, and I am reviewing a book I've only read once, then too me that may not be a quality review, rather a first impression. It's because of these reasons why I don't bother or struggle to make reviews on other sites, and why I don't fully trust reviews in my purchasing decisions because I also fall into the fallacy of just looking at the score.
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