Bought/Fake reviews?

its better to put a limitation on reviewing/star rating per weekly than this so boring to read reviews....

 

And there are many books with ~3.5 and even < 3 ratings that should be rated way higher....
And then there are some reviews that make you question whether you are reading the same novel or not.....

 

For real reviewers, it would vary from person to person. Since person A might like that kind of series/genre/tag but person B would hate it.

So all in all you could use the reviews as a reference somehow or something, but also check the synopsis and it's genre/tag and read a few chapters if you didn't like it at the very beginning like for example till chap 10 then there's a high chance that you wouldn't like it till the end [speaking base from experience here]

 

I know for sure that Qidian used to hire fake reviewers to give 5 stars to their novels, 1 stars to Japanese novels with quick and regular releases and even make fake reviews that say nothing about that novel in particular and can apply to 99% of the novels listed on NU, even the Japanese ones. Don't know if they still do this. I figure they still do, but the mods took them down quickly enough that nobody who would care noticed.

 

Paid reviews could be true. It happens everywhere else like games, online shopping, movies in the form of "sponsorship" or a free gifting of the product.

As people mentioned, a lot of reviewers automatically give a 5 or a 1 if they like or hate the story. That explains why there's such a dichotomy in so many series's review bar graph. And I think the dichotomy is positively skewed because people who like it are motivated to give a good score to keep the translators going, while the people who didn't like it are more likely to just move onto another story without leaving a rating.

I don't think there is a good way to stop bad or paid reviews. The limit to posting reviews by account name might be OK. People can't read multiple series in 1 day, although they might read several series and then one day decide to review all of them at once. But someone could just make multiple accounts.

One thing I'd like is to have definitions of each of the 1 to 5 score, and make it part of the policy that reviews have to explain why they gave that score. That could give more consistency for the ratings. For example, I made up my own definitions and copy-paste it in my reviews. I review almost every series I read, but I wonder if my reviews are terrible quality.