It's not specific to novels, people are critical in general of most things, if you can think of something good someone else could think of 100 things that aren't good about it. At least for novels usually barring massive issues it's mostly a subject of taste, strangely enough though even people critical of the bad novels would end up still reading a couple chapters in either because they're too far in to drop it or it's some sort of guilty pleasure indulgence ie a garbage harem novel.
Here is the thing, ratings and review on nu mean jackshit. They are neither accurate nor ever useful. I would honestly suggest just ignoring that they exist except from select few people who you know and trust to have good judgement. As for author/tl not liking the comments, well, it is the internet and they chose to publish their stuff for public to read. People will always leave all kinds of feedback, I would suggest ignoring it but I do understand it can get too much to ignore sometimes . Also their is a lot of overrated stuff on NU (just look at the top novels page for example), more often than not those comments tend to have a bit of truth even if they do not state why it is so, so like yeah...
I see way too many readers pick up books because they have high ratings. If doing so actually helped them find books that they enjoyed, that'd be fine, but it doesn't seem to be the case at all. This shouldn't come as a surprise because the ratings system is skewed towards certain types of books getting the top marks and a lot of these are actually terrible. Just look at all the posts on NUF asking whether BL books are as amazing as their ratings suggest!
I have mixed feelings regarding this. On one hand I'm not the type to be lenient on a story just because people have put effort into it, if I think it is crap I'm going to say that I think it is crap, though calling a story crap can be ambiguous as to whether it means a story is low quality, unenjoyable or both I do agree though that it is better to explain why you think something crap rather than just calling it that and then move on, and to try respect that others may still enjoy it. As for the quoted comment, that one seems like something written out of frustration because of a story being overhyped, though I don't know the context behind it.
https://www.novelupdates.com/series/my-wife-spoils-me-too-much Though after looking up the story (keyed the quoted text into google, and it only gave me 2 hits, 1 being this thread) I think OP might have misread the edit, or the reviewer places it badly, as that is not the whole review.
Yeah, that review isn't quite what I expected from reading the OP, even if I have no idea how accurate the review is to the actual story.
This isn't a review and doesn't conform to the review guidelines on Novel Updates. (https://www.novelupdates.com/review-guidelines/). If you see a review that consists of vague one-line criticism that doesn't tell you anything about why someone actually likes or dislikes a novel, please report the review. ... Novel Updates does not require that reviews be polite, particularly constructive, or even really thought out, but it does require a minimum of effort beyond simply calling a novel crap. Or good, for that matter. That said, the review this quote is taken from was at some point edited with considerably more content and is being mischaracterized. ... As far as people being rude and critical goes, that's everywhere. Criticism is something authors (and translators) have to accept from the moment they pick up a pen (metaphorically speaking). Would it be nice if all comments were either effusive praise or carefully neutral and constructive? Absolutely! Is that the world we live in? Hell no! ... So wherever you go, be it reviews here, reviews elsewhere, comment sections, threads on forums, threads on reddit, youtube videos.. wherever you go, there will be both praise and criticism. Novel Updates is not particularly bad in that regard, but I'm not surprised to hear someone say it is. In my experience, that sort of sentiment is bandied about literally everywhere in which criticism isn't actively censored or removed. If you don't see a fair number of negative comments somewhere, it's because people aren't allowed to make them. What you can do, if you feel that an author or particular novel is undeservedly receiving more criticism than praise, is write your own review. Speak up. Tell everyone that you like this novel and why you like it. Give it the praise you believe it deserves.
You’re absolutely correct however from my observation at the very least 80 percent of users that I have checked on their profile and saw that most of their reviews consists of 1-3 stars, 4 stars are rare, 5 stars are extremely hard to find even if it’s their favorite novel, I do know that i’m only checking an extreme minority of people but it does make re-question what does the 5 stars represent, perhaps in novelupdates the five stars representation is different from the rest? 1 star (trash) 2 stars (average) 3 stars (decent) 4 stars (best/favorite) 5 (Flawless novel with no plot-holes) perhaps novelupdates standards are extremely high and thats the reason… But I know for a fact novelupdates review system is far better than most novel sites (example: trashy review system of webnovel)
Ratings are extremely... subjective. And I don't just mean that in the sense that what rating you give a novel is a matter of opinion more often than objective measurement. I mean the entire rating system and what each star means to you is subjective. Some people do consider 5 stars to be something reserved for perfection incarnate. Other people freely assign that rating to novels they particularly like, even if they have plenty of flaws. I can't tell you what 4 stars means in relation to 5, because the answer would just be different if you asked someone else. At the very least, you can probably be sure a lot of people like a novel if it has high ratings. But that won't really tell you much about it.
5 star and 1 star should honestly be used less often. Problem is the varying degrees of maturity. Some people look at something that's honestly terribly written but they don't care because they in it for the hype. They just want to see the endless face slapping and live out their edge lord fantasies. The translation quality (though it shouldn't be a metric behind the rating) does affect it because if I can't understand what is going on, my impression of the work will naturally decline. I disagree with the vocal group that claims NU's rating/reviews are bad. They just represent the mainstream thought and that isn't necessarily bad. If something is truly good/bad there will be enough ratings to counteract any extreme opinions
It can also get more complicated than that in that one person can rate the same story differently depending on where they leave the rating. For example I mostly leave ratings( not reviews) on NU as a way of ranking stories on my own reading list based on my enjoyment of them compared to other novels on the site. So that is neither a proper judgement of their quality or comparing them to my favourite stories that I've read elsewhere, meaning if I were to rate the same story on for example goodreads I might end up using a entirely different criteria.
I mean I would love to see reviewers write with what they like and dislike about the novel, a 1 star book could be a 5 star book for someone, and 5 star book could be 1 star book for someone else, thats why people should not completely trust the “reviews” not everyone has the same taste, don’t judge a novel by it’s reviews and take the general public opinion as your own, give the book/novel a try.
That requires people are giving it a chance, which unfortunately too many are not. If stories had a minimum number of chapters and minimum "age" before you could give it a rating then I might see your mainstream thought as the ratings would be more likely (if ever so slightly) to be made by mainstream readers instead of trolls and fanboys who blindly give 1 and 5 star ratings depending on where they fall for that genre. People rate things at 1 or 5 stars way to fast, I have seen it way to many times where a story only has 1 at most 2 chapters translated, and there are plenty of 1 and/or 5 star ratings. Those are all all but certainly people who have not read anywhere near enough of the story to actually judge it, it varies from story to story but you need more then just the introduction to really and fairly rate something, to the end of its first major arc at least, but people to often give ratings based on tags in the story alone, which is bad. To many 1 star ratings could lead to less people giving the story a try, as there are people who use the average ratings as one of their criteria for giving novels a try or find them, which reduced its chance to get a fair rating. To many 5 stars could lead to people going in with false expectations, like the review in the original post, and people unfortunately tend to over react to false expectations. I have seen to many movies that are hated unfairly because people went in with to high expectations, and keep judging them against those initial expectations. Then there is also the fact that mainstream is not a simple concept, it is really a multitude of audiences, and the ratings should reflect the views of the intended audience(s), but what is here is people who are not part of that audience, or even able to understand the desires of that audience (many slow life isekai series are escapist fantasy for people working at one of Japan's many Black companies, or one of the over competitive schools, which are environments you average NA teen is not set up to understand due to massive cultural differences and expectations) rating stories as if they themselves were the target demographic. Then again, it really was mainstream thought that X stories are great, or Y stories are horrible you might have a point, but then why would these idiots blindly rating stories based on that criteria alone, there would be no point to hate on something no one likes, or to praise something everyone likes, and why would translators pick up the worst novels on the source sites. It is only if there are enough on both sides of the edge squire/fanboy camps to balance each other out that mainstream consensus gets to start to show, but it is still blurred.
Well I always see the bad reviews first then the good ones and most of the times I find those bad reviews helpful for they say many things about novel that good reviews won't and yes they can be biased, at times annoying but they are imo helpful, for me at least. So yes people shouldn't just ignore a novel if they don't like it. They should write (if they can) why they didn't so that other people might see it and decide if they want to read it or not cuz reading a novel that has thousands of chapter only to find it becomes s#it after 800+ chapter is annoying and it would not be a big surprise if someone leaves a review that contains only mindless cursing
It's simply a problem with Novelupdates and its whole rating system. I'm not going to blame Tony that he can't find any time to overhaul it, since that man is probably busy enough as is, but it's kinda saddening that none of the tech freaks, who are certainly consuming this site as well, have found the time to offer some help over the span of several years this site exists (and no, I'm a layman in that regard). Honestly, I've seen many novels where one chapter or prologue of a novel has been released, and several people already vote it down with 1 Star. That'd be fine if they at least wrote why they feel like like it's shit. Add a NTR or Yaoi tag, you can bet on getting a dozen downvotes without actually posting anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Usually, a rating system should have some bottlenecks to force those reviewing a series to give some proper evaluation along some criteria, and not just some random "My life sucks, so I'll downvote everything cuz I can. Hehehe." Since NU doesn't provide that, it's moot to talk about the reasons why people, who don't bother writing a review, downvote or upvote things. Not even mentioning, that this kind of discussion crops up every few months in some kind of endless loop.
If you feel the comment is not doing justice to the story. Maybe you can write comment too. Of why you dont think the previous comment is right on track based on your reading the story. It's valid to do that I think. I often saw comments like that. And it's good to know two different opinions of one story. As for feedback? Mmm....for what purpose is the feedback? This is nu not scriblehub.
I'm going to say because we're a web novel community. When you review enough of anything lackluster, while it doesn't make you good at doing it, it does make you an expert in what not to do. People like to think that you have to be good at doing something like cooking to understand tasting, but that's not true. Doing something and reviewing something are two different skills.