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What's Your View On Reviews?
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Brenda
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Oct 20, 2016 08:08AM
The reviews I write on Goodreads are for myself, so that I don't forget a book. I post real reviews, elsewhere.
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I read reviews to see whether I might want to read this book. I write reviews so other people can decide whether they might like to read this book. It is very cool when someone Likes my review, especially if I rated it 2-3 stars.
Laz,Are they "liking" your review for being honest and agreeing with the rating? Along these lines, does anyone know whether Amazon weights reviews with "likes" more than other reviews?
Also, what do you do when a book has hundreds of reviews? I for one would never bother reading any reviews in that case--the "bandwagon" effect is clearly operating.
I think someone said it earlier--the most trustworthy review or "like" of a book will probably come from people you know. That could include a reviewer whose name you recognize as giving trustworthy reviews, of course, i.e. you read her or his review, read the book, and then agree with the review. I doubt anyone keeps such records, though.
Another aspect that no one has mentioned is that just because a book gets a review you agree with--let's say 4 or 5 stars--that doesn't imply the author's next book is any good...or bad. In fact, you might have the Hollywood-sequel effect.
I'll repeat the point, though, that for a book priced at $5 or less, people can afford to take the chance on the book and/or author, unless they only read freebies, in which case they have no right to complain! ;-)
r/Steve
I mostly read reviews before reading a book if I'm on the fence about whether to read a book or not. If I read the blurb and am immediately interested, then I don't bother much with reviews. (This has both worked for and against me.)If I'm sort of iffy, though, then I'll read a smattering of high and low rated reviews, to try and get a sense of what people liked or didn't like.
I do read some of my friends reviews, assuming any have read the book...
Aside from sorting reviews based on star-ratings, I don't pay much attention to star ratings in general, and to the average rating not at all.
If I'm reading a book and not really liking it all that much, I'll read some lower star reviews to see if my sentiments are shared, and if it seems like it's worth it to push through.
I also sometimes read reviews when I've finished a book, again to see how my views meshed with other people... and to get some ideas on where to start my own reviews. (This is mostly for books that I don't know how to review. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to say, and don't want to be swayed by other reviews, so, in those cases, I write my review first.)
As to writing reviews - which I'm a bit behind on - I also write them mostly for myself, to remind myself about the book and what I liked or didn't like. I've been told I also write reviews in a conversational kind of way, like I'm explaining the book to a friend. I don't write "professionally". I tend to write the way I talk - with perhaps the occasional bought of flare thrown in.
And I do sometimes use gifs. Rarely, but it happens. Especially for books I really hated.
Colleen - Heehee! Put in the extra effort (GIFs) for books you hate! Nice.Steven - there is no way to tell why someone likes a review. Hopefully it means that they appreciated whatever insight I may have provided. I try to give details on what was good/bad or why I liked it despite some weaknesses.
For me, it's the time more than the money. There are lots of good books out there, and many not-so-good books. I read the reviews so I don't waste my time on a book that I don't think I'll like. Reviews from my GR friends are most valuable. If none of my friends have read a particular book, I will search for the 3-star reviews, as those usually mention the strengths and weaknesses, which help me decide.
This is going to sound snarky, but I don't need to write a review to know that I read a book. All I'd need is to click "Read" and maybe a star rating. I write reviews because I want to read reviews by other people. Give to get back.
I actually wrote a research paper about this. Specifically, assuming a book has piqued your interest, how do the reviews and/or ratings affect your decision to read the book, either positively or negatively.
My main conclusion was that ratings alone rarely positively affect the decision to read the book positively - i.e., if you're on the fence, and the books ratings are great, it doesn't affect you too much. But good ratings do affect the decision whether or not to read the reviews prior to purchase/reading.
On the other hand, ratings can and do affect an opinion negatively: The book looks interesting, the ratings are in the drain, you don't bother to read reviews and just take the book off your list, is a common scenario.
Beyond that *most* people (but far from all) curate their own reviews on sites that permit it (for instance, GR) and look primarily at review from people they already trust if they can. In other words the community reviews at the top of the page. The effect is actually very similar to the Critics vs Public split on movie review sites like Rotten Tomatoes. Essentially, heavy GR users create their own "critics" list whose opinion they trust to be honest and stable - whether or not they tend to agree with that opinion in general.
After that, most people (but again, far from all) look at a selection of reviews giving high ratings. and giving low ratings. And most people prefer one or the other - people who look at the high ratings reviews, tend to look at less of the low, and vice versa, but the difference was slight)
I also had a bunch of interesting conclusions about how existing reviews affect people's choice to write their own review or not, most of which come out to be pretty much common sense:
- If you disagree with the majority, you're more likely to write a review and the stronger your disagreement, the longer and more detailed your review is likely to be
- If you agree with the majority, you're less likely to write a review (not that it won't happen, but you have less incentive, so the odds go down.)
- If the book is contentious or polarising, you're more likely to write a review and again it's more likely to be longer than average.
(It's published on my university's papers database, if anyone wants to read the whole, extremely statistic-laden thing)
Mod
Specifically, assuming a book has piqued your interest, how do the reviews and/or ratings affect your decision to read the book, either positively or..."
Wow. We've got experts on everything in this group. That's awesome, Krazykiwi!
Only a sort of an expert LOL! Turns out, while product reviews are heavily researched, hardly anyone has done any work on specifically book reviews, and they differ quite a lot from products - a lot more subjective. There's a billion papers out there about say, phone reviews, but when you review a phone it's all concrete things you can compare to other similar phones: buttons, screen resolution, sound quality, preinstalled apps, size and shape. A book review saying "Well, it's about 5" by 4" and the paper is a very nice shade of just off-white, tending to cream." wouldn't sell many books!
Krazykiwi wrote: "(It's published on my university's papers database, if anyone wants to read the whole, extremely statistic-laden thing)"Would you provide the URL, please? ;)
Good grief, that was a pain to find. I hope it works.(view spoiler)
(Please be kind, it was only a junior thesis :)
Krazykiwi wrote: "Good grief, that was a pain to find. I hope it works."thx so much! i'm reading it now. is it a little bit of a small sample size? regardless, it is very interesting in the questions that were asked and the responses. "Browse for no particular purpose" = 21% of the total number of responses for the question, "When do you read reviews". lol.
Glib answer: It's only a small sample size in psychology if it's too small to provide any significant results :) The degree of significance for most of the results were in the 0,02% range -- that is, there is a 0,2% chance this result was just a fluke, and a 99.8% chance that this is a real divergence. Which is well under the line (5% degree of significance is standard for psychology in general), and the sample size is similar to several of the papers I cited in the previous research. So although I would have really really liked to get more responses, it wasn't unreasonably small.
I liked reading reviews of why people write reviews and why they like writing and reading said reviews......wait what were we talking about?
Scott wrote: "I liked reading reviews of why people write reviews and why they like writing and reading said reviews......wait what were we talking about?"Yeah, there may be a bit of self-selecting there, and here!
Mod
Ha! No, I think you hit it right on the head, Scott!
Krazykiwi,Here's a study I'd like to see: a study on independence. Consider book X and do a analysis calculating the number M of reviews that don't contain anything that's not found in some other review, i.e. something original. I'm willing to bet that after some total number of reviews N, M maxes out, indicating that no more reviews beyond N are needed because nothing new is being said. (I might need to tune the formulation of this problem, but that's the idea.)
You then could make a study across all fiction books, say, and see how M and N behave. They probably don't vary very much.
Of course, such a study is impossible for an individual, but Amazon's computers might be able to do it using all their stats. No money in that, so they won't.
r/Steve
Laz wrote: "I like MrsJ's reviews, but I disagree with her own assessment. She writes her reviews for her good friend Tamika. Each review is like an email or a diatribe over coffee. She explains how she felt a..."Thank you! :)
Steven wrote: "Krazykiwi,Here's a study I'd like to see: a study on independence. Consider book X and do a analysis calculating the number M of reviews that don't contain anything that's not found in some other ..."
Fascinating idea! Without access to Amazon's massive computing power, I still think it could be done on a limited basis with a herd of
But as you say, I'm not sure who would want to fund that kind of thing.
Mod
You heard Krazykiwi, folks. Empty your pockets. We have research to commission!
Hi Krazykiwi,It strikes me that the observation that a bad rating is more influential than a good rating lines up with cognitive bias for loss aversion
I like to read reviews, it's replaced my browsing.
Krazykiwi wrote: "But as you say, I'm not sure who would want to fund that kind of thing."authorearnings.com (established by Hugh Howey) compiles data on books published on Amazon and analyzes that data from a self-publishing POV. they have a crapload of computing power and expertise. they crunched a million amazon titles earlier this month.
they provide this service at their own cost. it might be worthwhile floating a short proposal that emphasizes a self-publishing angle.
@Graeme in #74 and #75: It's one of my favourite things to do too! Otherwise I end up stuck on Reddit looking at cat pictures. Which leads to YouTube and then all hope is lost.As to loss aversion, you are so dead on. I actually had that Tversky & Kahneman paper cited in my first draft of my paper, but ended up cutting it as I went a slightly different direction and ended up focusing a little more on the producer aspect (who writes reviews, and why) than I had initially intended.
Another fun factoid (because I'm really not expecting everyone to wade through all 30 pages of that)
- When people read a review that is markedly different from the impression they get of the aggregate rating, weird things happen.
-- If the review is really positive, but the product has a poor average rating, readers assign non-product reasons for the divergence: They assume the review is more reliable and trustworthy, and the rating is somehow dodgy.
-- If the review is really negative, but the product has a good average rating, they assign product-related reasons instead, and trust the rating, and assume the review is the outlier and the rating is correct.
(Obviously everyone doesn't do this, but en masse, this is what happens. A single good review of a poorly rated product can even eventually pull the ratings back up, while a poor review of a well-rated product is simply ignored as an anomaly).
Steven wrote: "Krazykiwi,Here's a study I'd like to see: a study on independence. Consider book X and do a analysis calculating the number M of reviews that don't contain anything that's not found in some other ..."
But do you really think that people will come to a point where nothing new is said? I think it will take a long time to get to that point, if ever.
Each person brings their own life story to each and every read.
Plus teachers...
Hi MrsJoseph - My experience of English class.Me: "Geez, this is so dull, like - what's a past participle."
Teacher: "Mumble, mumble, mumph."
Me: (Stares out window, shakes head slowly)
Teacher: (Louder) "Mumble, mumble, mumph."
Me: (Stares out window, thinks of latest Issac Asimov or Robert Heinlein book I'm reading)
Teacher: (Walks to my desk and shouts) "Mumble, Mumble, Mumph!!!!"
Me: (Head snaps around) "Huh!"
Rinse and repeat.
MrsJoseph wrote: "Each person brings their own life story to each and every read.Plus teachers..."
This made me laugh because I had a teacher like that in college. He would go on and on about how poets labor over every. single. word and how they were all chosen with precise meaning...
And I was like, "Dude, have you ever written a poem? Sometimes shit just sounds good... "
He also gave me half-credit on an essay talking about the meaning of something because, even though I fully supported my opinion from the text, I had "missed the point".
Apparently "the point" in this *CRITICAL/ANALYTICAL READING CLASS* was to regurgitate what the prof had told us the point was.
For the end of the year teacher review, I wrote that he was a "pompous windbag". Passive aggression FTW!
Hi Colleen,Sounds like a class in "Conformity".
Pretty much. I actually dropped out of that course because he was teaching the next semester, and I refused to take another class with him.
There's a (probably apocryphal) story that Isaac Asimov told about himself sneaking into the back of a lecture room to listen to a teacher discussing his work. At one point, after a lengthy discourse about what Asimov's theme was, Asimov piped up "But, that's not at all what the book is about." The lecturer asked "Well, how do you know?" to which Asimov replied "Because, Sir, I am the author."The lecturer then said "Well, it's a great honour to meet you Dr. Asimov, but just because you wrote it, what makes you think you know anything about it?"
I don't really care if it's apocryphal or not, it's pretty funny.
The fun part is that sometimes the author did color the curtains blue for a symbolic reason.Dorothy L. Sayers described once, to a friend, how she had tried to represent two "fake" worlds in Murder Must Advertise, and how the friend instantly replied, "And Peter Wimsey, who represents reality, never appears in either world except in disguise."
She was pleased that she had managed to get enough of her intention in for it to come through in symbolism.
Mod
Dorothy L. Sayers described once, to a friend, how she had tried to represent two "fake" ..."
I imagine that would be a sort of wry tedium for authors. "No, Wimsey only ever is in disguise in the false worlds, but the curtains really are just blue."
I put together my To Read list from Publishers Weekly reviews, and occasionally, a review from Entertainment Weekly will entice me. I don't pay much attention to star ratings, except for rating books I read so I can keep track of how each book I read compares with the rest I read. Occasionally, a review here, on LibraryThing, on a blog, or a recommendation from a friend will also get me to add a book to my To Read list (which is incredibly long at this point). I write reviews for me, but I share them in case they might be of interest to anyone.
MrsJoseph, ha, that reminds me of 'learning'/being misinformed in English that 'said' is overused and other terms should be used as much as possible. Because people don't like the repetition.Except 'said' is one of the most invisible of words, and when you run around thrusting your declamations and protestations down people's throats, that both looks uncouth and annoys people.
All,MrsJoseph's graphic reminds me how I aced N. Scott Momaday's English class: In every analysis, I'd include some Freudian psychobabble--wasn't hard for me to create it. The TA loved it (he was the problem, not Momaday--the Pulitzer winner taught me to love poetry, even though I can't write it).
I also aced my first philosophy exam. The generic question was something like "what do we mean by definitions?" so I wrote two blue books' worth defining "chair" from multiple POVs, including Bertrand Russell's theory of classes. The grade was A+ with the comment "I don't understand any of this, but it sounds good."
Other comments illustrate why I don't like critique groups or MFAs based on the critique concept: they're mostly designed to make your voice sound like someone else's!
I guess we're starting a separate "review of education" thread, or a "how to destroy creativity" one.
r/Steve
Mod
Interesting, Shelly! What draws you to those reviews over those by the masses? Do you find that you agree with their views?
Shelly,You're probably missing a lot of new voices by using Publishers Weekly, but that's your prerogative.
r/Steve
Mod
Anyone have more insight into this?
Allison wrote: "Krazykiwi wrote: "...But as you say, I'm not sure who would want to fund that kind of thing. "You heard Krazykiwi, folks. Empty your pockets. We have research to commission!"
Sorry, but if I'm going to contribute financially to any research, it's going to be towards finding a cure and/or effective treatment for Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and an assessment on comorbidity of certain neurological and/or psychiatric conditions & the potential links, correlation, causation & collagen systems' relation to brain function, etc. ... Much more important to me and my life. But that literary one would be neat to see, all the same.
Back to TBR list and reviews ... I mostly don't pay much attention to star ratings, largely because every site I know that has a review section for whatever their items may be has a slightly different approach to what their star ratings are supposed to mean.
Reviews are much more interesting to me when trying to decide on what to read next, especially if they're from people whose interests and views I know happen to be fairly similar to my own. I also trust certain of my friends to say something if a given book is likely to trigger my PTSD, or has other content I would rather avoid. But I will also occasionally request a book to R&R via LibraryThing's Early Reviewers or Member Giveaways pages, or NetGalley - not as often as I used to, because my health continues to deteriorate with time, which can make reviewing more difficult for me, but still from time to time.
My average GR star rating is 4ish, but I think - like most people here - that has to do with my being unlikely to pick books that I think I'll dislike, ergo my one-star ratings on GR are fairly rare, even when considering read-and-review exchanges. I think most people are unlikely to take up a book if they have a strong enough guess that they wouldn't like it. Seems reasonable, no? Especially if your existing TBR list is as enormous as mine is - it'll probably take me a good twenty years to get through the majority of my current TBR, not even counting the new books from my favourite authors that will be automatically added to it over time, so why would I care to add to it books I'm likely to dislike, and waste my treasured reading time on books that may end up in the DNF pile?
It's funny, sometimes. Oh, and if my friends haven't yet encountered a book, I read as many spoiler-free reviews as possible, or if a book has a great many reviews, I'll read a couple of the highest-rated 1* or 5* reviews and several with star ratings between 2 and 4; I don't always find 2-3-4* ratings more reliable, but more often than not they tend to be more balanced where the content is concerned, rather than coming from people who refuse to listen to anyone who doesn't share their same identical opinion on the book in question.
Allison wrote: "I think I'd either like to see the review structure start counting times reviewers said things like "brilliant," and "character-driven" and other buzz words, rather than just stars, OR to have the stars be comprised of a series of independent criteria, like on some other sites. You'd rate the writing style, the plot, the characters, and overall story separately, which would then be calculated into one star rating which could be drilled down for those of us who find such distinctions valuable. "I tried this in my younger years while trying to quantify movies. It pretty much failed immediately because it was impossible to come up with a baseline to compare different films.
Plus there's always the notion of the whole not equalling the sum of the parts, in good ways and bad, that ruins any attempts at quantifying art. The exact same elements arranged in similar ways by the same artist can have incredibly different results (Star Wars and the prequels, for instance), let alone when factoring in different creators.
While I think it's a nice idea, someone smarter than I am will have to figure out how to make that work. I don't get how it can.
All of this what Trike said. And Trike's great post makes me think about the fact I don't rate a book against every other book I've read, it's somehow more amorphous, and a little genre-bound. Because, like most people, I rate primarily for myself and based on how much I enjoyed it.
A book that I still remember 30 years later, even if it wasn't perhaps the best writing or had huge plot holes - the fact it made that much of an impression on me means it surely deserves a higher rating. Books that I can fall into and re-read over and over ditto. The book that I may never read again but was just so exactly what I needed to read at that exact moment, so I really enjoyed it.
But I read a lot of genres, and some of the books I rated 3 stars in Sci-Fi might be actually objectively better (more influential, more memorable, more re-readability, whatever) books than a romance novel that I gave a 4 or vice versa. I suspect most people rate (and read ratings) as genre-bound somehow in this way. So "4 star, I really liked it, for a romance novel", and "4 stars, I really liked it, for a Sci-Fi novel".
I'm explaining this terribly badly, I hope y'all get what I mean.
Back in the last century, there were Siskel and Ebert to review movies. We learned not to listen to Siskel on scifi, and to ignore Ebert on rom-coms. However, when they agreed on their reviews, you knew you could trust them.
Allison,I've noticed the addition of those survey questions and find them annoying. And it's hard to respond neutrally, and you can't choose not to respond! My critique goes farther, though: First, they don't apply equally to fiction and non-fiction (believe it or not, I do read a lot of the latter), and are even inappropriate for certain genres. Second, I hate surveys, and now I have to do them for Amazon every time I write a review. Third, they're just trying to make it easy for their computers. Why should I cooperate with data-mining efforts that dehumanize us. Fourth, I object to the very idea generally because computers can't really read or write (and maybe shouldn't be involved in the process at all). Even genre descriptions are just lists of keywords that help describe a plot, but keywords are first and foremost a way for humans to communicate with bots and computers--more dehumanizing.
Trike,
How many story ideas are there? I forget, but not many. We talk about road trips, girl meets boy, etc, but it's how the author tells the story and how the reader reacts to it that are important. I'm pretty sure I can design an algorithm for most of the standard story lines and program it, but I refuse to try. Computers won't ever write stories like humans; they'll never write good reviews either! (Maybe that's a new Turing test?)
r/Steve
Mod
Agreed, there are a lot of books (as Steven mentions, too) that don't play well with the rest of the literature. How can I rate the "pacing" of a case law book? Certainly some are better abridged than others, or more complete, but they are none of them Hunger Games.
It is an interesting thought experiment though, because as Krazykiwi said, as well, there are a lot of decisions that go into our perception of a book that are genre or subject matter specific. So I think you're entirely right, everyone, that there isn't a good way to capture in mouse clicks an objective or even consistent reviewing process. But I find it enjoyable to think of ways we could drill a little bit without first inventing the universe, to butcher Douglas Adams' quote.
Given that it's deeply flawed, and any dislike for technology aside, it's not gonna go away, yeah? The rating and review process is sort of what we have in an internet age. Eventually perhaps, we'll have something better, but my examples were meant to spark better minds than mine to perhaps think of something that would work fairly well in most cases. (I was looking to you, Trike! Be the hero we need! :-) )
Steven, I only just saw the new surveys yesterday! I'm really not sure what to think, either. I also don't know how they're using this data yet, so it's hard to see the benefit. It was a novelty for a moment, at least.
I think my personal favorite "user" review process is still the big bucket category ratings with an option to make a separate "overall" rating, to capture the times when a product is just average, but all put together it works beautifully. This doesn't really help with the objectivity, of course--a $20 decorative vase and a $600 vacuum are probably (hopefully) going to be considered on different scales. Similarly, Jane Austen and Dan Brown are not playing the same game. It'd be a work of lifetimes to come up with a system wherein all books could be ranked from best to worst.
So, futile still, perhaps, but maybe a little more data--a little more context in big strokes--may help the star rating a little more comprehensible?
Also, Tria, I do hope it was clear my comment about funding a study on data review was a joke! Your efforts do sound much more serious and I wish the researchers working on it a speedy breakthrough!
I like your comments about leaving higher reviews because of a self-selection that goes on even before finding a book to add to your TBR. It's probably true that in an age where everyone is an author and a professional critic like Laz mentions, and all books on Earth seem to be an Amazon search away, we probably have formed bubble environments which sort of inflate ratings already horribly skewed.
Gracious, now we've formed a nihilist philosophy of book ratings, I think.
Steven wrote: "Trike,How many story ideas are there? I forget, but not many. We talk about road trips, girl meets boy, etc, but it's how the author tells the story and how the reader reacts to it that are important. I'm pretty sure I can design an algorithm for most of the standard story lines and program it, but I refuse to try. Computers won't ever write stories like humans; they'll never write good reviews either! (Maybe that's a new Turing test?)"
The cheeky answer is that there are two stories: man leaves town and stranger comes to town.
(Man leaves town: Star Wars, The Hobbit, Wizard of Oz, Milo & Otis, Finding Nemo, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Stranger comes to town: High Noon, No Country For Old Men, Sleepless in Seattle, Toy Story, Elf, Groundhog Day, Jaws. All of which are ridiculous when boiled down to that, but it underscores the problem.)
But the real issue for me is how to quantify two disparate books. Finnegans Wake and Foucault's Pendulum are virtually plotless, so how do you compare them against a mystery or technothriller which depend entirely on plot?
If I happen to encounter either Citizen Kane or Star Wars while channel surfing, I will stop and watch them. There are numerous direct parallels between those movies which one can contrast: cinematography, special effects, acting, etc. (Most people don't realize that Citizen Kane has nearly as many special effects as Star Wars, or that it is incredibly funny.) But beyond that it's hard to compare them. Star Wars puts way more emphasis on plot, while Citizen Kane is far more experimental with its storytelling.
Some authors have rapid-fire delivery. James Patterson and guys like him have almost ludicrously short chapters. Some of them are a single paragraph, even a solitary sentence. Yet there are novels which have no chapter breaks at all, or have chapters which go on for pages and pages. I just read Machine Man which has chapters that are anywhere from 22 to 38 pages long. That seems like a difficult thing to quantify. Which style do you prefer?
Even comparing books within the same genre is difficult. The current trend in Fantasy is toward rigorous magic systems that have hard-and-fast rules, called Hard Fantasy. Brandon Sanderson's work, for instance. But George R.R. Martin is more old school like Tolkien where the rules are not explicit and the magic works by author fiat. Which type of magic do you prefer?
For me, that's what a lot of this stuff comes down to: personal preference.
I use the star system because I like to quantify things too, but if I'm honest, art really comes down to pass/fail for me.
Trike wrote: "For me, that's what a lot of this stuff comes down to: personal preference.I use the star system because I like to quantify things too, but if I'm honest, art really comes down to pass/fail for me. "
Yeah, that's pretty much the way I see it too. I use the star system mainly for my own reference. In my paper book log I have notes that roughly equate to the five star system. 'V Good', 'Good', 'Okay', 'Poor' and 'Crap'.
Someone else mentioned that the ratings move towards the 4 and 5 stars when you read what you want. That seems to be true. When I'm reading books picked by a book club I get much closer to a bell curve with 2 and 3 being in the middle. Very few 1's or 5's.
AndrewP,Interesting point. Although I believe the book club is still biased upward by your being a member, the books you choose on your own are biased upward more.
Probably if you just picked fiction books at random in a genre, say sci-fi and fantasy, without looking at anything, you'd get closer to a discretely sampled bell curve. [Technically, the five-star ranking or yours is just binning the results into five bins--this discrete sampling can NEVER produce a "bell curve," which assumes a continuous random variable. Just sayin... :-)]
There are more subtle ways to produce biases, of course. Presumably a known author (in the sense that you're read her or his other books and liked them) will produce an upward bias. Pen names that are too obviously invented and/or genre dependent might produce a downward bias. And so forth.
Quantifying these subjective ranking decisions probably isn't worth the effort. Reading what a good reviewer says, independent of ranking, is.
r/Steve
Allison wrote: "I like your comments about leaving higher reviews because of a self-selection that goes on even before finding a book to add to your TBR. It's probably true that in an age where everyone is an author and a professional critic like Laz mentions, and all books on Earth seem to be an Amazon search away, we probably have formed bubble environments which sort of inflate ratings already horribly skewed. "This is the express purpose of targeted advertisements and I had a long...very long post written up on word at home where I wanted to discuss those different bubble environments and perhaps get people to branch out and try new bubbles they weren't aware of but I was debating merging it with my long flowchart about genre's.
I guess the different bubbles are very noticeable when you are part of lots of them and yes Amazon gets very confused.
Maybe because I read heavily in two different genres - I notice that I get better ratings in my self-selected books BUT I'm also more likely to grade those books harder.If I'm really expecting A but I get C, I'm pissed.
SciFi and Fantasy Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Prince of Thorns (other topics)EL GIGOLÓ (other topics)
The Warded Man (other topics)
The Shadow of the Torturer (other topics)
Kindred (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Mark Lawrence (other topics)Don Viecelli (other topics)
Octavia E. Butler (other topics)
Dorothy L. Sayers (other topics)
Dorothy L. Sayers (other topics)
