Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
But, if they see fit to not use rating for what they were meant to be used for, then they are useless. Useless ratings are not what we want.
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They're not useless for the users who rate books according to their own personal system. If they treat Goodreads as a cataloguing site, for their own personal book catalogue (and that is a valid use of the site), and only look at their own books and ratings, they're perfectly useful.
They're also useful for the person's friends and followers who are familiar with that person's ratings system.
It's only the accumulated average ratings that people's personally different rating systems aren't useful for - but as said above, with a sufficiently large number of ratings, it's not going to really influence a book's average ratings that much all in all if one person goes by a "one star is the best, five stars means it sucks" system or "one star means I am really looking forward to reading it" or "this was an awesome book and I enjoyed it, but it's no Nobel prize winner, so I'll give it two stars" (and I've seen reviews saying pretty much that).
Anyway, it's easy enough for me to not have issues with this as the value of GR isn't in the average ratings for me - it's in me being able to keep a good book catalogue, to read reviews from others, and to interact with my friends. For just ratings with no reviews attached to them, it's only my friends' ratings I pay attention to as I pretty much know their tastes by now.