Do you think NU's review mostly negatives?

A review is literally a person's opinion on something.

Whether the averaged opinions [of those who left a review] actually matches yours, is a completely different thing. And if you're not the kind of person who leaves reviews on stuff, you already have a different way of thinking than those who do.

As a side-note: As much as I dislike Reddit, at least their comment ranking algorithm is quite decent.

I would actually be curious of the results of that formula if we map "4" and "5" scores as "positive" (the formula takes only "positive" and "total" counts). Or "is in a favorite list" (positive) vs "is in a list".

I want to see how that affects novel rankings.

 

You have translators promising more chapters if they get more 5 star reviews.
Just ignore novels with many 5 star reviews, the novel is most likely machine translated crap.

I still can't believe that we even have translators who change the plot because they feel the author is wrong.
It is no longer a translation but fan fiction.

I recommend reading negative reviews instead.
They are usually more useful

 

I like to read negative reviews, usually they list their reason. I find positive reviews that are made to please translator and is simple 'i like this!' more harmful. fluffy? why fluffy? what fluffy? where fluffy?
Reviews can never be 100% objective. readers are most likely to tell you why they dis/like a story than explain about story structure, character motives, etc. Everyone's taste is also different... some popular 5-stars novel can be a bland story that hit most people's liking.. or too long that people forget the bad and remember the good with rose-tinted glasses. It's more useful to find people with same taste as you and keep an eye on their reviews... but in these two years I've only found one with almost same preference as me. So mostly I read few chapters if the summary and tags are interesting.

I'm reading to spend time anyway, if I try few chapters maybe I can find unexpected gem.

 

I don't think NU uses complex algorithm besides the usual stuff that ranking novels based number of ratings, views, likes, submission date, etc. At least, I don't see any single page in NU website that uses algorithm to optimize the sorting besides common database query on the backend.

 

I do find many bad reviews in stories i've added to my reading lists. Honestly, some reviews made me apprehensive of the novel and i start to question if reading the novel will be worth it. Negative reviews make me stay away from certain novels. But i've learned to stop on trusting reviews ever since i've accidentally read a bad reviewed story. Now, i just skip reviews and ratings and read whatever im interested in.

This is so truee. I've tried many novels that have "fluffy" and "ant-inducing" in their reviews and the result was a 3rd degree eye roll.

 

I think the problem is the review system itself. I personally do like critical/negative in-depth reviews...except on this site. Because half the time, the top/most-liked review is a 1 or 2-star negative based off of less than 20% of the novel. So meaningless. I guess it does let me know easily if I can nope-out early... but sometimes these reviews completely misrepresent of the actual story because the author ended up taking it in a completely direction in the next 80%? Reviews for episodic releases are a hit or miss since rarely can you predict the whole story based off of the first 20% (or else why would the author continue writing?)... but yet these are the most common and well-liked reviews on this site? That said, time is precious. If I read a book that didn't interest me in the first 10%, I would drop it for myself... but I wouldn't leave a review to discourage other readers because I'm not reliable source of information as to whether the ENTIRE novel is worth it for someone else who has more patience/different interests than I. If I want to leave a positive review, I just wait until the end before reviewing. If I was determined to leave a negative rant, I slog through the entire novel, no matter how trash it is, just to feel justified and vindictive in my rant lol...

Most useful reviews for me are 3-stars and/or the one with the most progress (often whoever MTL the story).

 

That's the same everywhere though, not just for novels but also for games. Whether the review is positive or negative, whether it's an ordinary reader/player or a professional reviewer, the vast majority of reviews are made after reading/playing less than 10%. It's unusual for someone to finish entirely before writing a review, at best some people will update their reviews or make a second review after they're done, and those will almost never be negative because very few people (even if writing reviews is their job) will completely finish something they don't like just to write a review. You can only ever expect that for very short games/novels.

NU is at least better than most places because it often tells you on the review how far the person has read, most other places you have to rely on the reviewer to tell you.

Your expectations are even more unrealistic here, when webnovels can be the equivalent of 20+ books and take >10 years to translate; should nobody ever write a review in those 10 years? Should everybody take months to binge 5000 chapters they hate before giving an opinion? And then a lot of translations, probably even most of them, will never be finished. Not even 20% of the novels here are currently completed.

Lastly, MTL is not nearly good enough to base a review on. That's like reading a detailed summary of the plot and giving a review based on that summary without actually reading the book; that's enough to review the premise and maybe most of the plot, but you can't tell anything about quality.

 

I do think that the reviews on NU are worse than many other places, but there are two specific reasons for this, and they don't reflect badly on NU itself. The first is that a lot of the people here are relatively young and that youth is not conducive to well measured reviews. Most other user-generated ratings already skew too heavily to either giving 1s or giving 5s. Get younger people contributing and this effect is only strengthened.

The other reason is that people on NU rely too heavily on the ratings in the first place. The reality is that they're junk, but all too often I see advice like "only read books that are 4+". And I don't get it - given all the problems inherent with the ratings system, how can anyone think that this is good advice? I attribute this problem to the youth of the userbase as well, but I'm not exactly about that. Look at other sites with similarly young people generating ratings and we get the same effect.

(It does amuse me though when people try to check out highly rated books and they end up finding scads of BL novels. )

I don't entirely agree here. People giving ratings too early is a huge part of the problem on NU. I'd say that prematurely high ratings are more of a problem than prematurely low ratings, but both are sort of a problem. I've come across tons of books that have high ratings because they start strongly but end up becoming complete junk by the end.

And there is a solution too: right now all ratings are weighted the same, so just alter that so that people who've read the whole book are given more weight. It's sort of pointless though as this would only change the value of the ratings from completely useless to completely useless.

 

At the same time, I think younger people value their time less and are willing to give more of a chance to novels that don't start out particularly strong. At least that's what I did in my early M&A days... Actually, possibly all newer readers fall under the same category - they have nothing real to compare to.

I guess it depends on whether you wanna find some hidden gem novel that will be a marvel to read (good luck) or just something light to relax to, which is my goal for most novels on here...
The way I used to find books here was based on the number of readers + the number of releases (+ release frequency), backed up by the rating. Unfortunately, this method has been ruined by NU banning walled chapters...

Not if you exclude it

I'd actually prefer reading a book that starts out strong and dropping it if it gets worse than not read it at all (as long as the quality drops late).
Still, I agree that early votes shouldn't be counted. You can leave a rating for yourself, but it should be counted in like 100 chapters increments, with the option to see the fractional votes or something. I'm not saying you have 32 votes for a novel with 3200 chapters, just that your vote should move forward as you go along in the story.

Of course, neither my nor your suggestions won't get implemented without a complete overhaul of NU's system. Mainly switching from releases to chapters. So we're just talking hypotheticals here, just for the sake of having a discussion

 

That's a bad assumption to make.

The thing with ratings being useless is that ratings are useless. They're not a better guide than randomly clicking on things in the first place, so there isn't any real difference other than that your expectations are misplaced.

Sure, everyone learns their lesson eventually, but the amusement comes from all those reactions before it happens.

The other thing with ratings being useless is that ratings are useless. I'm not posing my suggestion as a hypothetical. I don't want it implemented in the first place because all it'll do is trick people into thinking that the ratings mean anything.