Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
And those are the people that botch the rating system. But I mostly blame GoodReads as they allow it to happen when they could easily fix it.
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Goodreads staff has maintained from the beginning that ratings are for people to use as they see fit. It's a personal cataloguing site as much as a social interaction site as much as a book/review database, and everyone can use it for their personal purposes in ways they prefer - which includes rating books by whatever personal criteria one has for their own book catalogue.
This
does mean that the accumulated/average ratings are pretty useless on GR (although they still give some broad idea about the general opinion about a book - you can be relatively sure that a book with an average 2.43 rating is considered "worse" by most readers than a book with an average 4.54 rating), and that people who prefer to choose their next read by "whatever is rated highest in the genre I am interested in" might do well to look somewhere else or at least read/skim the reviews for the high-rated books.
(Also, I don't think you
can rate a book without "reading" it on GR as such - I'm pretty sure that if you go to rate a book, without having it on an exclusive shelf first, it will automatically mark it "read". Although I think you can then later change the "read" shelf to another exclusive shelf.)
I'm not at all bothered by it - whatever system a site tried to enforce, ratings will always be subjective, not just in that tastes differ but also in that one person will three-star a book they genuinely liked and enjoyed (but didn't find outstanding or groundbreaking) while for another, three stars means they barely managed to make their way through it and everything they enjoyed gets five stars by default.
As for the topic in general, I also think it's a pretty natural progression - the first ratings and reviews will always come from people who are the most excited to read a book, whether it's friends and family or fans of the author/series or people who have been swept up in the hype (and it's easy to "overrate" a book when you've been all hyped up to read it). Often people will even go back later and take off a star from their initial rating, when they've had some time for the initial excitement to wane and their thoughts have settled.