Litwit Lounge discussion

The following clip is from this article/broadcast at: John Green shows flaw in Goodreads' book rating system

For author John Green, the pressure is on.

Users of the website Goodreads.com, which allows users to rate and review books, have already claimed his next novel is one of the all-time greats.

...but it isn't even finished yet.

As of Tuesday, the "Untitled" upcoming book held a 4.19 rating from 186 so-called "readers." Green re-posted a piece to his official Tumblr page that read, "I sometimes wonder why people rate books before they're even published or written?!"

The situation points out an apparent flaw in Goodreads' rating system that allows users to review books that haven't even been written yet.

It goes on to show 5 classics that his unwritten book has already surpassed in ratings. Oops?

Charly wrote: "Is the flaw in the rating system or the membership screening criteria which I believe is simply the ability to go online." Goodreads members have to agree the Terms of Service, and can be expelled for engaging in behavior that violates them. But it's difficult to imagine how members could be screened before the fact, in a worldwide network whose management has no way of personally knowing them. The TOS function as a kind of screening, in that if you agree to them, it's presumed that you're willing to behave in a civilized fashion.

The TOS, though, doesn't forbid rating and reviewing a book you haven't read. The way the system is set up, I think any book in the database can be rated and reviewed; and while I'm not a computer technician, I'm not sure the software could even be configured to limit that. Anybody can add books to the database; and when the publishers release the necessary information to add a book to the database before publication, there's no real way to prevent that either. It could be argued that this is a flaw, but it's one that seems to be built into the logistics necessary for a network like this. The corrective, though, is in the common sense of most site users; most will recognize that it's impossible to take a rating seriously when it was assigned before the person could possibly have read the book. (People do review advance review copies, but that's a different thing, and will be stated in the review.) Those kind of ratings unfortunately do affect the book's average "score," though. :-(

I would really like to see the ratings disabled if the publish date has not yet occurred.

On another note, I do look for the ratings when I'm interested in a book. And I'd like to see more readers putting out 'spoiler alerts'... it's ruined a few books for me.

Usually, I don't pay much attention to the average ratings of books; they're too easily skewed, and I don't know anything about most of the raters' tastes (they may not be very similar to mine). I do read most of my friend's reviews of whatever they're reading, and sometimes mark a book as to-read because of a review; but other than that, I don't usually check out other people's reviews of my TBR books until I'm ready to write my own review.

I agree that people should not be able to rate unpublished books. Though it must be very flattering to an author if fans are so sure that the next book will be brilliant. :)
Another issue with the ratings, something which cannot be controlled, is that people's friends, critique group members and family may go star-happy and rate a book 5 stars just out of loyalty. And the haters will go on 1-star binges. (And, Charly--I wish there were more options, too. Maybe not negative stars for me, but 1 star just doesn't say "hated it!" like an actual "zero star" would.)
Just the star ratings aren't enough to help guide me, either; the written reviews are much more useful.