Star Ratings
Jan. 29th, 2025 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alaterdateIf you hover your mouse over the star ratings on Goodreads and Audible the 3-star option is "I liked it" and "Pretty good" respectively. But to me 3-stars means "It was okay." It's not a book I would particularly recommend, but also not one I'd dissuade people from reading.
Herein lies the problem. If the websites are marking 3-stars as "good" instead of "okay" then in actuality shouldn't all my 3-star ratings be rated as 2-stars instead? "It was okay" (Goodreads) & "It's okay" (Audible).
Then all my 2-stars would drop to 1-star! But 2-stars is just an abysmal rating. A 2-star book is one that I would mention how I found it lacking if someone brought it up. And I save the 1-star rating for things I actually didn't like and would want to dissuade someone from reading. I don't really use star ratings in the contents of my own reviews/logs or on my website. I have a loose tag here I've been considering removing in favor of just tagging them with genres, but I do mark them on the website. So should I follow their metrics when rating books on their site?? It seems much harsher than my actual opinion.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-29 09:24 pm (UTC)something i used to do when i had a goodreads was to make either a positive or negative comment justifying the star itself, formatted like the below (though a super generic version)
(+) liked the pacing
(+) main character was my guilty fav type and charismatic
(+) one particular plot twist blew my mind, let me tell you why.
(-) thought the descriptions for scenes in the back half were mid
(-) wasn't a fan of [how a particular scene was handled and here's why]
.... and so on. this was a surprisingly popular layout and i got random compliments/likes on my reviews done like this for *years* despite being mostly a lurker. think people liked the transparency? idk.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-04 03:20 pm (UTC)That's a nice system. A pros and cons list might be a better alternative to even selecting a star rating at all and is more in line with how I write my own logs anyway. I'll try it out!
no subject
Date: 2025-01-30 02:18 am (UTC)But FWIW, 3 stars being a "pretty good" makes no sense to me either. It's the midpoint of the scale, so it should be the most neutral rating. I find it hard to believe that most people are really giving two stars to books they thought were "OK".
no subject
Date: 2025-02-04 03:05 pm (UTC)It's a pretty arbitrary system. I've seen people lay out whole criteria for their star ratings and that makes sense, but usually they are rating multiple criteria and then mathing out an average and I don't want to do that (I got a Book Journal for christmas one year that prompts you to do this too, but I don't want to convert the categories to fit audiobooks/comics etc., nor do the math lol).
I find it hard to believe that most people are really giving two stars to books they thought were "OK".
Exactly! I swear 3 stars used to have the "it was okay" hovertext. GR changed it up. I think most people would agree that 3 stars is neutral.