I realize this distinction is subjective (there is always more to learn!), but can we get some more guidance on this?
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Can you give us an example? It is somewhat subjective but I think at the edges. Do you identify as a language learner?
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I definitely still identify as learning spanish. but I’m less and less able to tell how hard most things are. some of the obvious tells as to how hard something is, high speed or (multiple) non standard accents, don’t register except in more extreme cases. My biggest issue lately is poor/terrible sound quality during production or transfer making it so I can’t hear much of the dialogue. I feel capable of saying something is harder (+L35) since it’s still work at least for the first 30 minutes or easier (-L26) because of there only being two or three cast members or obviously talking slowly. The inbetween has become ambiguous over the last month. And revisiting shows/movies that were clearly very hard a year ago has only muddied the water further as many (but not all) are now fully in the ambiguous and widening middle.
The same thing with books. I’m not certain I can tell the difference between L28 and L38. I make an initial note about my first impression but after 20-30 pages I don’t notice much unless it’s clearly too hard for me, pre 20th century, a subject I’m utterly unfamiliar with or obviously harder than Pedro Páramo: 189 (Letras Hispánicas) | L42.
One of the reasons Natively helped me so much this last year was that I’d been told all sorts of media were “easy” when it wasn’t for me and made me not just frustrated but disillusioned. This last month, outside of marking movies as hard, I’ve begun to suspect that I’m mostly just polluting the L25-L30 range of easier native non childrens’ media.
I realize first passes are never quite right, but I could use some advice.
And sorry for highjacking the thread.
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for additional context, I’ll consider myself a language learner until I can read Don Quixote without risking an aneurysm and watch three episodes in a row without a pounding headache of
High ambitions.
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Chiming in for a second:
I’ve heard a lot of people say things like this in Japanese which feels wild to me at my level. I wonder if it would be feasible to have a notion of a user’s read/watch level and if it’s a book that is too far away from that in either direction either not prompt the user to grade, or only ask for very large grading differences. I may be a native speaker, but I can tell you that Hop on Pop is easier to read than Shakespeare, for example.
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I have trouble distinguishing levels below 30 (all kinda samey to me) but imo in Japanese there’s a general sense of up til the low 30s you shouldn’t be hammered with niche vocab and the grammar will lean towards straight forward VS flowery. A lot of the times when I’m grading I’m actually thinking less of how hard it felt to me and more weighing those factors against those in the book it wants comparison to. Maybe not everyone does that, but I’d rather a book have some sort of grading than none at all and it can be adjusted by the next reader.
Cutting out your pool of advanced learners will mostly just cut down how many books get graded 
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That’s kinda my point. I know grading something with zero grades often starts by asking you to grade against the hardest thing you’ve read/watched and then refines it by grading things closer and closer to the place it thinks it should be. If you could grade it into a 5 level band and maybe not into individual grades in that band as an advanced reader I think that could solve the problem of someone not being able to tell the differences between things that band. 
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TBH I don’t think high-level learners neglecting to label themselves “native” and grading things potentially “inaccurately” is an issue at all. The important distinction between learner & native is just understanding the general order learners are introduced to concepts and what kinds of things trip them up; if you have that experience and remember what it was like to struggle, with what, and are bearing that in mind, your gradings will be in the spirit of the site. Natives are excluded because they don’t have that perspective, not because they’re advanced in the language, and I think Brandon’s idea of a prompt simply asking the good-faith question of “do you understand difficulty from a learner’s perspective or a native’s?” would work fine.
Gradings are all subjective anyway. A high-level learner isn’t “wrong” if they rate a level 25 book as the same difficulty as a level 35 book, that’s just their honest opinion of the difficulty. The point of the system is getting the subjective opinions of many different types of learners with different difficulty criteria to distill a useful average out of… even if your grading isn’t what most other users at a different level would agree with, it’s still valuable data to record. (And if you truly don’t think you’re able to make a useful comparison between 2 books, you can always skip the grading.)
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The problem is that the system doesn’t do that. It’s always the last grader who has the most influence. Otherwise gradings wouldn’t constantly go up and down for plus minus two levels, even if there are many people who graded it before.
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self-taught people, like me, don’t always have this progression, but I think your broader point of coming in with a learners perspective is a good one that I’ll keep in mind.
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I don’t know what you’re talking about here 
I’m never asked to grade things against the hardest books I’ve read unless that book is also somewhere in the 40s. If anything I’ve had multiple instances (reported as a bug) where it only prompts me to grade against books of the exact same level
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Okay, it’s not just me, good
I also get asked to grade against stuff that are the same level, even if that level is dubious.
Example from primerose (which I added, so it has literally no gradings, and the default level 24??)
I am asked about ARIA, which is literally level 24
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Oh hmm, now that I think about it, it’s maybe only videos that do it for me, and the hardest thing I have watched (and not marked English subs) is ~29ish… which is below the default 30??, so I guess I’m having the same behavior but because my top level is below the default levels it’s actually accidentally working correctly
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This is a huge problem for me for books that have already been graded a lot. If I’m just asked to compare a bunch of books with a 95% chance of me grading them as “about the same”, I don’t feel like I have the opportunity to actually influence the difficulty rating much.
Care to share this bug report?
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Sure thing! It’s this one: Bug: Grading not actually doing any comparing
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I’m looking forward to the addition of more languages! While I’m personally not interested in English, I will recommend it to a lot of my friends (who actually told me they want to start reading in English but feel lost) and my kids and their friends and… probably many more 
I will not rate myself, but will I try to add some easier books.
About myself, I can’t wait to get French going. I started reading a while ago, and while I understood all the books, I still have lots of troubles and many look ups. I will definetely add a bunch of books and will grade the heck out of them Also can’t wait for book clubs starting in French
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It’s funny, one of my colleagues started learning French and has been asking me questions about the book they try to read during lunch break. Turns out they picked “Le petit prince” as their first read. I told them it might be a bit hard for a beginner. They then asked what they should read instead and I had no clue. Gee, if only there was a service that could provide difficulty estimates for books 
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I’m just starting native french tv series. you add the books, I’ll add the tv shows!
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Le petit prince is usually the first native book read in schools here, but they read graded readers fitted to their textbooks before. The grammar was unusual and uncommon words weren’t repeated due to the kind of episodic story line. But other than that, the writing style is really nice and flows easily.
Some schools around here have lists of easy native materials, but there is never a lot on them, and rarely are the books interesting. So I can’t wait to help build up a french base line here
No matter the language we add, I think it’s important to have a tag or filter to find actual native materials and not just translations. Not sure, maybe we already have those, but I never looked, cause I’ve only read japanese manga so far.
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Omg, no one understands french, right? I can read books, no problem, but watching something and I will understand less then watching an unsubbed anime I’m thankful for your service and hope there will be something, I too can understand
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