After skimming over reviews before deciding on reading the novel, I feel as I read the novel, I tend to compare it to the opinion of the reviews, and see if I also feel the same way, or is it wrong, or it's right...haha reviewing the review I guess.
Rather than the reviews, I tends to more believe in ratings. But, sometimes the reviews also affecting my opinions, and I do compared their opinions with mine. Well, every person have different views of point of everything.
sometimes~ just a guilty pleasure of mua~ for fun~ to find some points to express stuff cuz this cat is lazy bum on explain why its good or bad to other~
Yep, I do get influenced by reviews a lot and sometimes end up with false expectations or skipping good novels... So I try to not check the reviews unless necessary (tons of spoilers there anyways haha- though they are helpful for gauging basic levels of translation quality) and just judge off the summary + ratings.
sometimes I don't read the reviews before reading, and many times I find myself regretting for not doing so because I had to suffer through many chapters of a novel rated under 3 stars but sometimes it depends on mood whether I think the story is good or bad. I can be perfectly fine reading the story for one entire day then the next day I feel like I've wronged myself
I always look at the summary/1-3 chapters of the book first and then the reviews to see what people think and if I’m interested. There are also times I don’t read the reviews, but in the end, wished I had read the reviews to save myself some time.
Man I'm the biggest hypocrite, nowadays I tend to check out reviews before I start reading a novel, and while a bad review won't deter me, a bad spoiler will. Generally it's when its about something that compromises the stories. Like the plot diverging in a weird direction, or some sort of event like a character dying. Best example I can think of is a review for story about some guy getting sent to a tutorial dungeon on hell mode. I read a good chunk of it already, and was enjoying it. According to the review though the protagonist ends up getting killed off and replaced by some rando. I immediately dropped the novel after reading that review. Now here is the hypocritical part, I have for the fun of it gone back and read some reviews for stories that I already finished, or am currently reading, and a lot of times I think the bad reviews are terrible inaccurate. Basically a lot of the bad reviews seem to obsess and nitpick over the tiniest thing. Sure they'll have a somewhat valid point, like so and so is really whiney and annoying, but it will be some sort of character growth thing where they deliberately start off bad, but get better over time. The reviewer though will make it sound like they're the worst character ever, and how their presence makes the story unreadable. But I'll just be thinking "Dude they complain like 10 times tops over 50 chapters, and get better after that, what are you going on about?" So yeah if I see a bad review for a story I've never read, I tend to heed it. If I see a bad review for a story I've already read it's usually nonsense.
Nowadays I only look at reviews to spot check for certain landmines (mostly terrible male love interests) before starting a book, and they're not even all that good at that. The problem is that reviewers will often omit problematic elements in a story they like. What this means is that the reviews for the most popular novels end up being the least reliable ones. For example, "The Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of Military Lineage" is one of the top rated novels on NU. The problem with it is that almost all of the positive comments about it are about the first third of the story and almost none of them mention that the last third of the book is vastly different (and much inferior). The book still isn't that bad, but the reviews end up being very misleading. Or how about this, "Reverend Insanity" is one of the most highly talked-up books on NU. But the prose in the book is actually pretty bad, and nobody mentions this! Instead they just heap praise upon praise about how good the writing is! To be fair, I suspect that the translation manages to salvage this to some degree, but there's a limit to what it can do. Omissions like this just make it impossible for me to put any real faith in reviews here. It doesn't help that you can find tons of threads where posters talk about how they checked out the highest rated books and got burned as a consequence.
Same same, but ngl I often used to just read reviews to see people's summaries and not bother with the actual novels ┗(˙◁˙ Now I'd just skim through the reviews and hope I won't be to biased tho lol
I always try to avoid reading the reviews for a novel I find, but sometimes I cant help it and see a 1* review with a very lengthy explanation on why it sucked and it completely drains my motivation to read the series even if i found the synopsis interesting
Yup I also focus on ratings, like especially that of the reviews. Like if almost all reviews have four five stars, then the novel is recommended read
I couldn't care less. Let me see the goods first. I don't want it to be spoiled. Though, decent synopsis is a must for me to give it a chance.
There are to many troll/false reviews on NU to bother making a judgement or expectations based on them. also to many "automatic" 5 stars as well. You can not even trust the ch. listed on the review because people blatantly lie about that as well. (I have seen a review where the troll complained about something not being explained, when the explanation was like 1/3 of the way into what they were claiming to have read, and not something an explanation was strictly needed for). That and people complaining about stories not having elements that are not needed for its genres, or worse would make it not that genre in the first place. Like there being no cold blooded murder spree revenge, in a story that is not about revenge at all, or they are demanding it against people who have done nothing near enough to justify death, let alone a torturous death. You know the "anything outside what I want to read is idiotic garbage" crowd
I would say that negative reviews, even the ones that are incorrect, are more useful than the positive ones. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the main ones is that reviews are a poor resource for finding good books to read, and they're much better at filtering out the books that you should avoid. Also, there's an inherent bias in that people who like a book are likely to avoid mentioning anything negative about it; even if it's something that's crucial. On the other hand, people who have negative opinions on a book are much more likely to tell us why in detail. Moreover, negative reviews also tend to be more accurate - you'll see people give top ratings and effusive praise even to books where the author doesn't have the foggiest clue what creative writing is. How can this kind of thing be helpful to anyone?
I usually don't read reviews for a novel until after I've finished it, or I need validation as to why I hate it. Looking at rating distribution is enough for me to decide whether to start a novel, not reviews. If I stop halfway through a novel to check reviews its because I want to see other people roast this story for the same reasons that I dislike it, subconsciously giving me a valid reason to drop it lol I fully agree. A story is only as good as it's worst reviews, ESPECIALLY on this site.
Hmm I usually just quickly skim over the reviews and check the ratio of positive and negative reviews before deciding to read the novel. If the majority are positive then I'd avoid reading the negative reviews because it would affect on what I think of the story and characters. I'd rather start reading a novel with a positive note and discover the "flaws" by myself. However, if the reviews skews more on the negative side then I'd just happily read them and not waste my time reading the actual novel lol.