Am I weird in the sense that I have a distrust in novels with an overwhelming high ratings where the green bar is very noticeable? More often than not; I drop highly rated ones. But I find the ones with an evened out ratings to be more pleasant to read. (There's also times where I read ones with terrible ratings only to love them...) 『Random Nonsense Start!』 I was born, born without sight, hearing nor smell, only vague sensations. Driven by instincts I sought after the needs of my body; food, shelter, and eventually a mate. How long has it been since I was given life? Without a sense of time I did not know, nor did I seek an answer. After a long journey, or perhaps it was a short one, I've found all that I needed, of course even a mate! Life was good for the little creature, but as it is with all thing, they eventually come to an end. As the little creature grew so did the children of an nearby village, and now it was the of of their first hunt. As the children of a remote village, hunting is a necessity. Wether it was for food or for clothing, hunting must be done and now it was the time for the young ones to begin their very first hunt. Needlessly to say the children were all looking forward to this day. In the end the creature without even a name was not killed by the children and lived happily ever after with it's mate after all, children(Lolis) are supreme and can't possibly kill an innocent creature! Written by yours truly, Tsukiko Tsutsukakushi the Loli Lolicon
While I agree that ratings can be misleading and that some novels with low ratings can be better (the so called hidden gems) but you seem to have developed some sort of sense for novels with plots you will like and for those you won't XD
I have to look at the types of comments. If I see a lot of zealots, that probably means it's not really that good
Highly rated novels may have a chance to be bad but novels with a rating 3.5 and below are definitely garbage.
*never even looks at ratings* If anything, I guess I can say my taste doesn't necessarily align with the mainstream stuff people tend to like on NU, so there are some decent chances of me not necessarily liking the top rated stories~
I think most people on NU are not professional reviewers, able to judge a novel on its individual merits instead of "I like what I like and this is (or isn't) it!" so most novels are gonna end up overrated or underrated based on how mainstream they are. Also, I think that if a novel has a bunch of 3* and 4* ratings, surprisingly, it might be worth reading more than a novel with only 5*. Since the 3* and 4* rating people likely found it worth reading despite seeing its flaws, while the 5* people didn't see the flaws yet and might drop it without changing their rating on NU. Rare novels might not have any appreciable flaws, but I doubt you'll find many web novels like that.
I always feel guilty whenever I see "staff member"since you're the only one I never remember... Agreed... Wonder how different everything would be if all reviews are professional...(Then again, everything on NU is originally meant for Asia~) Never? *Amazed*
Yeah, I don't see much point in them. The title/summary/cover already tell me basically everything I need usually. At most I might also check genres/tags, but that's it.
I mean... I basically never enjoy any novel under 2*, so yeah, I use ratings to eliminate novels from my reading pool!
review can help rating can help summary can help description can help tag can help but..... it can also fail so this cat just ride along~
The books on NU just aren't that good. There should be very few that can qualify as 5/5, so it's pretty fair to assume that anyone giving out a 5 just isn't being critical. In other words, their numbers are useless. Think about it: why should anyone care about what I say about a book when it's obvious that I never bothered giving it a fair evaluation? A 3 or 4 means that the person doing the rating at least put some effort into it. Books on NU that are rated highly do so because they tend have a ton of 5s, and as we've already established that 5 scores are useless, it means that these overall ratings don't actually tell us anything. All in all, it's better just to ignore them altogether.
That's why I always account their completion rate, the beginning of most novels are great so they usually garnered a bunch of 5* reviews at that time.