Deb's Answers on Goodreads discussion

Is everyone a member of Feedback?

This is one of the official Goodreads groups and is moderated by Goodreads staff.

It's primarily a place for Goodreads to get feedback from us, but it's also a good source of information. It's the place to report bugs, ask questions, make suggestions and read announcements.

Sometimes the members of Feedback get to beta test new features.

This thread seems abandoned, but the only one I can find that appears to match my topic -- so just in case someone is listening (and can help me find the appropriate place to voice this):

STAR RATINGS on goodreads, A RANT

I am relatively new to goodreads, but after just over a score (i.e. 20, as in, "four score and ten") of reviews posted I feel like screaming the following from the virtual rooftops of the city:

When WILL goodreads finally offer fractional star ratings??? How hard can it be to implement numeric input, visually rounded to the nearest half-star? After all, the overall average is also displayed numerically to two -- TWO!! -- decimal points.

The psychology of the venerable method of rating anything with stars -- especially when, unlike on some technology review sites, say, there are no sub-categories, features or criteria to rate* -- is such that, I'm fairly sure many readers agree, we do not use it to guide us as if the values were linear, but rather in a skewed bell curve:

The important numerical values are, more or less:

1, 2, 2.5, 3, anything between 3.25-4.25 to at least one decimal point (where most of the "competition" for my patronage clusters), 4.5 and 5 (both pretty much "must-read" if they fall into my area of interest).

True, fractional ratings are probably most useful as comparative ratings averages on books with 100 reader-ratings or more. But this figure can be significantly skewed by the effect of individual, arbitrarily rounded-up or -down integer ratings being averaged.

What's the point of a mathematically "accurate" average based on a ridiculously coarse and inaccurate sample? How would the final figures differ if the calculator based them on the "actual" half- or quarter-star rating frequently offered by the reviewer in the text body? (If the answer to the latter turned out to be: hardly, then I would stand corrected and quietly slink off into the fog...)

Could those many, many of us that obviously agree with this peeve gather somewhere and submit a petition or poll ... or is there at least already a feedback thread somewhere on this site that I can join and that goodreads staff might pay attention to?

Please help me, o gentle souls sympathetic to my most dreadful plight! (subtle, self-deprecatory irony intended here ... ;) )

Thank you!

* (footnote) I'm sure some of us have, for example, run across the separate "hotness" rating offered by publishers of romance novels. I'm not sure whether,say, genre-specific sub-ratings would be useful on goodreads ... my gut says "not". In any case, this would be an appropriate topic much further down the line ...

Otis won't let us have half stars because he read a study that claimed that people rated less when there were too many choices.

Deborah wrote: "Otis won't let us have half stars because he read a study that claimed that people rated less when there were too many choices."

That actually makes me quite mad. Not only is the reasoning ludicrous and vague (what exactly constitutes "too many choices"), but here is one person who in the name of what's "good for me" is depriving me of my own choice to make.

That flies in the face of all the reviews I've read on goodreads where people go to the EXTRA effort of supplying a decimal rating IN ADDITION to their star rating -- which is more choices than less. Plus, half stars don't mean "too many choices" -- if you click on a full star, you rate just as before, and won't even be able to tell the difference.

But if "Otis" won't get his head out of the sand, why don't you suggest how I could organize a poll among goodreads members ... Maybe he will pay attention to THAT study....

If I could figure out how to do a search of posted reviews (unfortunately the rather lousy search engine on the site doesn't seem to allow for this), I would try to determine how many fractional ratings are actually posted. Though I'd assume this would be easy to do for an admin, if only he bothered to check.

Sorry to vent at you, but your rather terse reply (not sure whether you're just being neutral ;) ) didn't do anything to improve my mood on this. Actually, it made me feel rather militant about my "right to choose".

If there were another similarly extensive site where I could rate my reads more precisely, I'd switch today. You can tell Otis that, too. But again, one person's voice hardly counts ... so what would be the best way to get others involved? Would it be allowed to start a group about this (nothing already there falls in the category of site feedback, as if the powers that be really couldn't give a hoot about the opinions and suggestions of its members)?

reductio ad absurdum:

Isn't goodreads about giving us a choice among a vast sea of reading options? If what Otis claims is true, then goodreads should seriously limit the number of books a need to plow through as well, to "help" me find the right one. Say, 5 books (like stars). That should prevent my poor little consumer brain from overloading... Oh, and make sure they're all "Reader Digest" versions, just so I don't have too many WORDS to choose from ... because I might just give up on reading otherwise, faced with such overwhelming CHOICE.

-------

Seriously, Deborah, I mean it: thank you for your reply, you KNOW I'm not flaming at you, merely hoping to stir up the discussion! I'll certainly be linking here from every one of my reviews. Maybe a trickle can turn into a flood ....

The Goodreads feedback group is here: http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/1

There are lots and lots of threads about half stars, it's been discussed to death and is pointless because Otis said no. Not sure if you know that he is the owner/creator of goodreads.

You could go to LibraryThing, they allow half stars. Many people use both sites.

I want half stars too, but it's not going to happen.

Thank you so much for pointing this out to me and finding the feedback group for me. I tried but couldn't. Now of course it's staring me in the face under "official groups". I've skimmed the raging debate on half stars and am flabbergasted by the no-half-stars contingent and their arguments. In my mind, half-stars do not affect anyone who doesn't want to use them, since at the end of the day there will always be, visually speaking, 5 stars, not 10. But obviously human psychology, emotional intelligence, or whatever, is far more convoluted than I imagined.

Well, that's that I guess. Looks like LibraryThing is an option, but not free above 200 books. So I have to decide whether to take a stand on principle, even though it would be a royal pain for me and make no difference to anyone, or whether I'm just being as much of a stubborn, self-defeating fool as someone else.

I could just take the star ratings with a big grain of salt, or else refuse to use them while still reviewing books verbally.

Since I now know that this thread is not the proper venue for this at all (thanks!), please feel free to delete these messages from here after reading them. I won't post any more.

Cheers!

You're welcome! I agree with you.

No problem, you're welcome to ask any questions here or just to rant. I plan to put some rants about goodreads here myself, if I ever get time.