Do you rate/review everything you finish on Natively? Why (not)?

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Natively is definitely not like that.
At least for me, I give 3* when the book was fine (not the greatest ever, but it’s still a good use of my time), 4* was a great time, and for 5* I literally couldn’t put the book down. And that’s pretty much consistent with what I see on the site. If you look at popular series, everything is around 4* average (ranging somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5), with the exception of ONE PIECE, which appears to be almost 5* (but I cannot see the actual value on the series page; it seems to be only available for individual book pages).

All that to say, don’t worry @ka5, rate as you feel like.

Also, there are people who I’ve learned have similar tastes to mine. If I see a 4~5* rating from them, it doesn’t matter if the overall is <3* (and vice versa).

You can still rate if you don’t finish.

With respect of the topic at hand, in my case, rating something also automatically marks it as finished if it wasn’t already in my wishlist or stopped or something. It’s much faster than having to click the down arrow and then set as finished… especially since I will then typically rate the book anyway.

The only books I haven’t rated are the one I read long before Natively was a thing. In that case, things are pretty much a blur, so I can’t really give an accurate rating and that irks me (so I just don’t).

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I rate and review everything, except sequels unless it’s something notably different from the first book (or stuff I read in the distant past). Also use the Goodreads scale of rating, so 3 stars is “I liked it” and 2 is “it was okay”. Do not care at all about the quality of my review - figure it’s more useful to someone deciding whether to read something than having no review at all and I’m not going to stress about it. Plus, I forget what I thought about a lot of books so the review helps jog my memory.

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I almost always write reviews (exceptions for books with many reviews already or some Aozora Advent works where I’m just busy and forgot) but I would love to review without star rating. Like @Biblio I dislike “rating” memoirs and I felt pretty icky about giving a star rating to a memoir covering child abuse, but I had to because I wanted to comment on it.

Also I see people writing about not knowing what to say in reviews. Please anything. I love reading reviews and I’ll take something over nothing!

I also love reading reviews of people hating books I loved because it’s fun to see how different people interpret the same book. The opposite is a bit less fun (but occasionally good) because people tend to be less specific when they like something.

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Ability to review without rating
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I rate everything - why wouldn’t I? Genuinely surprised by the amount of “I don’t feel my ratings would be useful” comments in this thread. I’m sure I would find them useful - especially on books that have free to no ratings. Tho I do appreciate @earwen 's point about about not reducing art to numbers

Similarly I review most things. If I don’t write a review, it either means I was too tired, was offline, or very occasionally just didn’t have anything to say that wasn’t already said. Sometimes they come out as well written reviews, and other times I’m lucky if I get a nice sentence or two. I like to write and read reviews for successive volumes in a series, and reviews I’ve written for those have sometimes read to discussions on here. It depends on the series tho.

I love reading other’s reviews - both to get a sense of what’s in a book, and also to see what I might agree or disagree with. Sometimes there’s something specific I’m hoping to find out in advance. Often they bring up aspects of a book I couldn’t/wouldn’t have considered or known about in advance. Particularly helpful when people write about the language. It’s also helpful for knowing whose ratings to discount (when evaluating for myself).

I find it frustrating when someone low rates and doesn’t leave a review. Like is there something genuinely “wrong” with the book? Were they just reading a genre they dislike? Are our perceptions of things even similar? Was there something offensive to them that I’m not gonna be bothered by reading?

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When I rate a book I compare it to other books of the same type, like children’s books with children’s books, and manga vs manga of comparable type.

So a children’s book getting a five means I like it extraordinarily among children’s books. If a novel gets just a four, it will very probably be objectively a better book than the children’s book, but among novels I like other novels more.

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This is why we need a user affinity feature. I’d love to find users who tend to read and like similar books to me, as it could lead me to other books I’d also enjoy.

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I rate everything or almost so. I do this selfishly so I can look back and realize I like a particular director or that I don’t like a lot of 1950’s/60’s spanish films but that I love the late 70’s to early 90’s.

Also, after I finished with juvenile literature, I spent almost a year refusing to read an author twice in an effort to read as broadly as possible. After 40 or 50 authors, I needed those rating to remind me of who I wanted to revisit first, who could wait and who to avoid.

I’ve found at least one person on the spanish side that I agree with often and go back and look at their list when I’m not feeling inspired. I’m grateful for every one of their ratings, good, bad and indifferent. I’m also grateful for the couple of people I disagree with consistently as I take their high or low ratings with skepticism and I don’t mean that with any snark. All these ratings help me figure out what to read/watch or what not to.

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This thread makes me think I should put my profile on private because I feel so different about most of the stuff written here :smiley: (although I am not disagreeing much, I just have a different view on things, mainly that I find star ratings on art meaningless, same goes for goodreads and I like bookmeter above all because it doesn’t have star ratings).

I just don’t want people to look around my profile and judge me for not rating every book or grading wrongly or not writing reviews for 1 star boosk, etc etc. I get the feeling more and more that people are a bit judgy around here and it makes me feel a bit dejected. :smiley: This is a hobby for me and shouldn’t be another stressor in my life, I have enough of that in my job and other responsibilities :sweat_smile:

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This is an interesting thread and I like the curiosity that @bibliothecary started it with.

I rate everything, but sometimes I feel a tug of - rating it how and for whom and on what set of criteria? I’m intrigued by the handful of people who have mentioned ratings for art are meaningless to them and also not rating memoirs as a matter of principle. That helps to voice for me why in some cases I struggled to give a rating, or where I internally felt like giving x number of stars but externally decided to give y number of stars. I think that will give me permission in future not to rate something.

I appreciate the different perspectives; it’s important to understand each other as a community. I certainly don’t want everyone to be the same. It’s great that some people rate and equally valid that others don’t see the point! It’s helpful to understand some of the reasons now.

how I rate

I think you may have written something similar before, and I like the simplicity, so since reading it, this is what I keep in mind when I rate, perhaps since the last year.

I struggle to give ratings of 3 or below because it feels negative, so I typically only give 1-2 if something really ticked me off. And a 3 might become a 4, perhaps in those cases it would be better if I just don’t rate it :roll_eyes: I can see why people say don’t overthink it, but on the other hand, choosing not to rate is an equally valid signal that I hadn’t considered before. If I see 14 people have read a book, and only 4 have rated it, and there are no reviews, then actually - sometimes that sends me the middling signal that the majority rating it 3 or 4 star doesn’t give. I hadn’t previously considered sending that signal myself.

Also, it’s pretty funny for me to look back on my ratings. Early in my Japanese learning journey, I was so happy to read anything I gave almost everything I could read a 5 lol. I decided not to scale them back in retrospect even if I might rate them 3-4 now because that rating is true to what I felt then.

I write reviews for books that don’t have them, and I try to think about what someone just below the level of that book might want to know about it. But I don’t expect everyone to do that, it takes a fair amount of time. If everything has been said by other reviewers, I don’t write one.

I for one am glad you spoke up!

I personally love seeing what you read and don’t care one iota that you don’t rate everything. I would be so sad not to be able to peak into your profile. But I would understand, and then maybe I would just have to ask more questions about recommendations. You do you!

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Yep, that’s also my system here - and mostly because it feels like other people use it too. It leads to me never using 2 though, and I’ve only used 1 once :laughing:

Personally I’d prefer the Goodreads system (@suadang mentions it; “2 stars” is considered “mid” there), but I guess you gotta go with the mood of the site… and at least “3 stars” doesn’t mean “awful” here like it does on some other sites, so I won’t complain too much.

As for ratings: I rate everything I finish. If I drop something I’ll only rate it if I truely think it’s objectively awful. If I drop it because it’s just not to my taste I won’t give it a rating.

If something doesn’t have any reviews on its first volume I always consider leaving one.

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Alright, as this is the hot topic in the threads, I gotta join in too :smile:

I feel like i’m very much in the “not in their nature” to review group.. but as I started the site, I had to do it quite a bit. I found that you’re right @bibliothecary, with a little encouragement you can probably get some more engagement and perhaps that sparks people to get used to it. But it’s also a lot easier to do if you’re in a heavy immersion phase with reading and watching.. as everything is very top of mind and easy to make lists! I used to be in that phase.. but now I’m fortunate enough to get a lot of immersion just living here.. so my reading & watching is pretty darn infrequent, making comparisons & strong opinions hard.

Regardless though, while getting people to write reviews, leave ratings & grade is wonderful (some slight encouragement is warranted), I think it’s the wrong focus. The site shouldn’t ever make you feel bad, even in the slightest way, with however you want to use it. Many people are sick of social networks and purely want to track for themselves. And just people logging items is very beneficial to the site. @yukitanuki please keep your profile open! :laughing:

WRT getting more reviews & gradings, I strongly believe that recruitment of people who like doing such activities already is much more effective approach than changing people’s current behavior.. and that’s on me, @nikoru and @mathew to fix. Mostly, the site has had some technical issues and lack of progressive enhancements to continue to grow the community. Natively should be the place where language learners who are heavy immersers get together to do book clubs and talk about their favorite books and write long reviews. Right now, a lot of those people still hang out in discord or other places.. we have to convince them this is the right place to be!

So I feel your pain @bibliothecary. But rather than making more @bibliothecary 's from our current group, i think we need to find a few more @bibliothecary’s out in the wild! At least 1-2 more :joy:

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Oh no. :sad_but_relieved_face: Don’t take it to heart, yukitanuki; I don’t think most here are actively judging anyone (I hope they’re not, at least). I know for me not seeing a rating or review on a book several people might read might bring on a momentary bit of sadness, but then I move on and forget all about it; give me five minutes and I couldn’t tell you which book I was looking at. I certainly don’t go looking for names to start adding to a mental black list.

And it’s the same here - if I’m browsing someone’s profile, ratings and reviews are a distant third to what I’m really looking for: what books you’ve got listed! What custom tags do you have set up? What books do you have wishlisted?

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I’d like to think/hope that most (all?) of us are emotionally mature enough to be able to separate our (perhaps very strong) feelings & opinions on the topic from what any individual user does. If mine was one of those comments, then I apologize. That wasn’t my intent.

This thread has actually given me more of an appreciation for why people might not rate/review fwiw.

Personally the only times I’ve been a bit judgy about someone else’s rating/reviewing habits are when I got the impression the person was rating/reviewing things in bad faith. Even then, it doesn’t really mean anything besides “I’m not gonna pay attention/give weight to their ratings on other books”

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I am sorry, I didn’t want to sound so dramatic and I wasn’t that serious about closing up my profile :laughing: I just wanted to give another perspective especially since I’ve seen another user also mentioning that they felt a bit judged about their gradings. I just wanted to make clear that I use this site as a hobby and I find those discussions about how can we make people do more a bit tiring. At least it’s not the first time I’ve been seeing this and I personally find it unreasonable to put any more pressure onto users with their gradings/ratings/…

There are also suggestions about implementing more nudges towards making people do more reviews and stuff, which is why I wanted to voice out why this could backfire, in a way. At least for me, this would make me want to use the site less. I already have a hard time even keeping up with logging things, please don’t bother me with any popups on top of it! This is not to say that those nudges wouldn’t maybe improve overall site quality (because I think it could work very well), but me personally would be annoyed by it, as I use this site after work to relax and not to do my ratings homework. :laughing:

For me, reviews are the most beneficial thing and that is why I try to write as many as possible (I think my review ratio isn’t too bad, after all). I also do ratings whenever I have a clear image in my head where a book lands for me. Sometimes I have no clear image and then there’s no rating.

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I’ve never really given much weight to reviews. I will sometimes take a quick glance to see if there is something specific that I would want to avoid, but mostly I just find something that looks interesting and will maybe skim the description. I usually, quite literally, judge a book (or show) by its cover. Sometimes it bites me in the butt (I have bought several manga thinking the cover was cute, only to find out that it’s something wholly inappropriate after the fact), but usually it just results in me getting a pleasant surprise as I find something good that I wouldn’t have picked up from the description alone.

I guess I subconsciously assumed most people were similarly disinterested in reviews so I just never felt the need to leave any, and I only left a rating very rarely, mostly just if it was a 5 star experience. I can see from this thread how wrong I was. :joy: I’ll try to rate more often and leave reviews if there aren’t many in the future.

When I do rate a show/book it’s always just a quick thought of “how enjoyable was this?” After all, the subjective enjoyment is the most important part of choosing what to read/watch. Everything else is just informing the question of “will I enjoy this?” Though with this site, there is another question of “is this at an appropriate level for me?” But that’s what the level gradings are for anyway.

With the scant reviews I’ve left on other sites in the past I’m usually a bit more in depth, but even then I don’t break things down as much as some others do. It’s typically just a quick list of the highlights/lowlights with a few connecting sentences so that people can find red flags and green flags.

I’ve never in my life thought people would judge a lack of reviews/ratings this way. I’ll keep that in mind.

Please no pop-ups. Maybe just some static text that reminds users that reviews, even poorly thought out ones, are helpful to others. Possibly add a link to a blog post or to this thread so people can read for themselves how helpful they can be.

The option of rating/reviewing an entire series instead of each entry would be great. Especially for longer series that drastically change in themes or quality over the run. It would be a lot more helpful to get a single review that covers the entire series and how it changes, rather than a dozen smaller reviews that hyper-focus on a specific installment.

Some of my favorite series ever have 3-4 stars on this site so people are definitely more nuanced here than on other sites. Though to your point, a 5 star rating from me can be anything from “This is one of the great works of art that everyone must experience before they die” to “It was funny and I was in the right mood“ to “I grew up with it and cannot separate my nostalgia from the actual quality“ so it can be a bit meaningless sometimes. But like others side, this effect goes down with more ratings.

This basically aligns with how I rate things as well. With 1 star being truly awful and I regret ever trying it, and 2 stars being not worth my time, but not horrifically bad. Most of what I read/watch will end up being 4 stars because I am easily entertained. With 2 stars being the rarest because if it’s that bad I’ll stop before I have given it enough time to feel justified in leaving a review. But if something is 1 star you can usually tell pretty quick and it’s easier to justify leaving a rating despite not getting very far because of the strong taste left in your mouth when you experience something that is truly awful.

:eyes: Is there a feature request for this? Personally I would prefer an “Others who enjoyed this also enjoyed”-type widget on the book/show page. Or a “People who like series that you like also like” widget on the homepage. That would also incentivize people to give ratings at it would be used to improve what gets recommended to them on their homepage.

In general I agree, but there are also people like me who would leave ratings/reviews, but just never thought it would be very helpful. Some kind of clear messaging that indicates that the ratings and reviews are helpful for others would help to increase the number of them a bit. Though the best long term strategy would definitely be to cultivate a user-base that already wants to leave reviews to begin with.

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Please don’t take this too seriously, it has a :wink: added to it.

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I don’t rate since the userbase here is quite small and I don’t want other users to be discouraged from reading a book/watching a show they might enjoy just because I rated something low.

I know that my ratings can be considered “very harsh” by other people. (My average rating on Goodreads last year was 2.1, granted I was quite unlucky with the books I’ve read). And since for now I’m stuck reading easier books instead of something I might normally read I would probably have to rate everything between 1-3 stars.

This is why I like something like Steam system way more. A simple “would you recommend/reread it, yes or no (I would also add maybe)?” makes for a much better system since most people tend to use 4-5 stars for anything that isn’t terrible and 1 stars only for totally atrocious things anyway.

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Compute "affinity" and give suggestions of people to follow would cover the part I mentioned. Though I think going a step further to have “Others who enjoyed this also enjoyed” as you said would also be good. I don’t see a request specifically for that, but maybe it could be folded into Book Recommendations.

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I for one will read any new review in the feed, even if it’s a book that I will never read. I enjoy people talking about media, and sometimes that will get something that I would have never thought of reading or watching on my radar, and sometimes it will tell me that I never, ever want to read or watch it :sweat_smile:

I don’t leave as many reviews as I should (a lot of time I’ll talk about media on Discord or in forums and then never actually put those thoughts into a review, which I want to get better about), but when I feel more (or less) than “this is worth watching/reading”, I generally review. I always grade (or block gradings if it makes sense for the situation), and almost always rate.

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I don’t really care about ratings but I love reading reviews and seeing peoples’ thoughts on a book, and I try to always write reviews! Books that have had many people read them but no reviews seem so sad and lonely to me :smiling_face_with_tear:

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