Discussion Reviewers reviewing novels...

I want to point out the fact that this is how I feel about the recent review section/reviewers or even the older one. You can feel free to argue below.
Okay, I get it, you want to review a novel.
Go for it! I will really love it if you review a novel or two since that helps newcomers/novel readers to choose whether or to read it or not. I myself am not a reviewer, I lurk all year(5 years now) and going strong without really interacting with the community.

BUT PLEASE! Oh god please don't ever review a novel without at the least read up to 30-40 chapters or whatever chapter is available. I'm begging you.

I want to address two things.

1st - Readers are reading your review! 2nd - Details are important!
Make it detailed! Don't skimp out on details of whatever event and write whatever you think actually happened there without reading it closely. Do not keep people away by false information and very inaccurate details, I see a lot of people doing that and some receive dozens of likes and completely crushing out actual reviews with good treasured details.

First impression matters right? Reviews are the first impressions, If you look at a novel with 2 stars rating...you're most likely not going to read it. Reviews are much more seeing as people are actually talking out to new readers to warn or recommend the specific novel. A reader can interact and click the like button leaving the review itself to be much more convincing, and then like I said above, people that clicked like on inaccurate reviews are the one that mostly dominates the review section. Keyword -Mostly

I am a person that reads the reviews thoroughly, In fact, even the slightest bad review will leave me scared and backed off by the novel, and I can only assume that some people can relate to me.

Heading off to bed or reading novels/watching YouTube videos. Just wanted to late night rant per-usual.

 

This advice might help. Whenever you read a review, always click on other reviews by the reader. If it is all hate or all five stars, do not bother with even reading the review. Also, like this you might find a review of someone with similar taste to yours.

 

Nah, there's nothing could be done about it. When this site grows big enough, it'll be no different than MAL where the top reviews are just either stated that this is good or bad without reasons or details.

Majority of people are too lazy to read long paragraph. They just want to know whether it's bad or good. The top reviews will have major impact especially with the number of likes. Humans, after all, would follow the bigger group. It's bandwagon effect.

 

Great stuff!

 

Whenever i read review that are so detailed i'd skipped it, reviews are meant to be skimped since if the reviews are so detailed you'll feel spoiled of it, just saying the good points and bad points are good enough.

 

The ratings make no sense to me. In fact, I'm still surprised whenever someone brings up the "fact" that readers use ratings to determine whether a story is good or not.

In another world, it could be useful I guess. But here I've found that it's just a number. I could get a far more accurate impression of a story from the summary and story tags and it only takes 5 more seconds...

 

There are more "problems" aside from reviews by uninformed readers. Some reviewers don't realize you have to be at least a bit objective, and if they see something they don't like they tank their given rating. Or, some give ratings higher or lower than they actually would give to try to manipulate the overall rating. In general people give pretty high ratings for what the novels are worth on NU (Above 4.5 is mostlygreat, above 4 is mostly good and below 4 is a bunch of flawed mixed bags).

And you can go on and on about it. But that's just how it goes with user reviews in general. I only read a third or a quarter of all reviews because the others just aren't worth reading in my opinion.

Ratings do have meaning, in the sense that if you take a random 4.5+ novel you're in all likelihood going to like the novel, while for a 3.5+ that chance is a lot lower. It is a very general metric, and should only be part of your decision whether a novel is worth picking up or not.

 

Those 2* are usually pretty accurate though. I skip the 5* ones because it's just nonsense, I only read the 1-4*

But people that review at 1-50 chapters I skip too, don't get the point in even leaving a review at that point. (well unless the novel is brand new and thats all there is.) but reading till 20 hating it and dropping it, pointless.

 

30?
nah~
I prefer whole thing lel~
I read review sometime to see how a person can be so dumb or so smart for my own amusement~

 

Lol, good luck at getting a review at a novel with monthly release rate, you'll wait for 4 years before anyone leaves a review if they follow your advice.

Or for novels with long chapters like Youjo Senki.

Reviews show when the review was made and at what chapter they made the review at.

If someone makes a review at chapter 5 because they dropped the novel back then, this means the novel was so so bad, that the reviewer couldn't read more than 5 chapters... It is a perfectly reasonable reason to make a review.

Your point is flawed.

 

... There's too much bad review advice.

The "read X number of chapters" standard is terrible. There could be things in the prologue that make me not want to read any more, things that aren't in the title/summary/tags, things that make me want to warn other people against. And seriously, a well-written novel gives enough of a hook to want to keep reading from the first few words of the first chapter I see. If I have to force myself to read 30 chapters, I'll only give it a worse rating. Especially since I can change the review/rating later if I keep reading.

Review when you drop or are certain you'll read to the end.

HAHAHAHAHA no. Spoilers are useful if you use spoiler tags and you feel a need to give specific examples, but you should do your best to get your point across without spoiling the story. There's a summary at the top. There are tags to the side. You're not being paid by word count, so don't pad it out.

Get right to the point. Try to avoid saying it's bad because of its genre/tags or because of something in the title or summary. People who hate rape will probably not need to you to write "it has rape" in your review to avoid Pure Love x Insult Complex, and people who hate maids should probably not look at a novel called Maid Will Go on Through Thick and Thin! in the first place, let alone need to check the reviews to see if's really about a maid. Instead, point out what parts of the novel the author does well and what parts are done poorly, and if you think you need to, give specific examples with spoiler tags.

 

Actually, no.
Whoever judges based on the stars rather than the actual review is an idiot.

If the stars are low, and the review doesn't make much sense, avoid it.

If a review has a lots of likes, has low stars yet doesn't explain anything other than feelings, avoid it, those might just be some pissed off teenagers who don't know how to judge, but some people resonate with their feelings like them. You have preferences and can judge differently.

If a review has low stars yet a good explanation, even without any likes, pay some heed to it. Maybe try reading the first couple chapters to see on your own.

You can be your own judge. Not all novels deserve their ranking, and you definitely are missing on some pretty good ones.



Also, I think this is common sense, but don't just read one review and be over with it.

 

@Tony We need the option to vote down reviews or at least unlike reviews
@Shio @Westeller

 

The ability to reply to them sounds really neat too.
But let's not bother him with this now, he already got his hands full with WW's links.

Edit: Also, I say no to disliking reviews for the same reason Facebook doesn't use it, as well as for the uniquely bad ways this could be exploited...

 

There is no need to prevent people from giving reviews after just a few chapters as long as they list the number of chapters they read.
I just wish you could at least sort reviews by the number of read chapters though, so that reviews by people that read the whole thing could be displayed first.

 

I disagree with most of your points.

1) Some novels are clearly terrible early on & not likely to get better. (See my reviews for Magi's grandson/Bringing supermarket to another world/Otherworld business symbol/etc). I don't need to suffer through 40 chapters when it's already that bad by chapter 12. Also chapter length matters some like Overlord & Dungeon defense have relatively very long chapters but others like ATG are relatively very short (and extremely padded).

2) Super detailed reviews are generally bad in my opinion since they tend to spoil things. Write reviews not book reports.

3) Not sure about false information. Most reviewers tend to be accurate enough when talking about the novel they're reviewing. (But I did notice that many reviewers suck arse at analogies/comparisons; they'd think a novel is like a completely different novels because the word goblin is in both.)

4) A bigger problem in my opinion is vote fixing/botting/etc. A lot of terrible generic typically Chinese novels get highly rated with few reviews.

 

Did I ever say I hate the like limit? Yeah, I really do! >.<

Many CN novels have tons of viewers, it's normal for them to get lots of high ratings.

Reviews are only for the more dedicated people, those are far in-between no matter how many readers the novel has. It's highly unlikely there is a bot rating stuff.

There are haters that rate BL novels at chapter 1 as 1* though, can't do much about those that badly rate a novel just because of the genre... *shrugs*

 

Could just disable the whole system in general and put out a recruitment for volunteer reviewers. Leave a community star rating and a reviewer's rating as two separate metrics. As for whittling down the number of novels to be reviewed, just set a % limit where a novel has to be at least X% translated or 50(an example) chapters in before it can be submitted for review.

At the very least, there should be a way to reply to reviews otherwise a person can just flat out lie and tank a novel. And yes, there are people in this world who upvote a review without actually reading the novel.