Extreme number of ratings

Reads 9924 • Replies 124 • Started Wednesday, September 2, 2015 9:09:13 AM CT

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Message Theydon_Bois P admin beers 40552 º places 1239 º 02:59 Tue 9/8/2015 Originally posted by SarkyNorthener Originally posted by Hippoman I’m relatively new to this site and doing my best to keep my head down, drinking and rating beer and chatting to enthusiasts about subjects I find interesting when I can. But I have to say, some reviews from the tick-heavy style raters are as good as worthless to me. I stumbled across this today: "Cask @ Bricklayer’s Arms, Putney SW15. Pours a golden color with a small white head. Has a fruity weak citrus hoppy aroma. Fruity malty weak citrus hoppy flavor. Has a fruity malty citrus hoppy finish." For me a review like that is pointless as it’s as bland as one can be and offers nothing to help fellow drinkers that a pump clip couldn’t. It sounds like one of my reviews(except for the spelling mistakes, the missing U), but I haven’t drank in Putney for a good five years. For a lot of people its more a personal record than helping others. Also the review sounds like a golden ale. It is probably just a bland review on a bland beer. When a beer exites you, the review can follow suit. Last bit of what Martin says is very true. You can go to a CAMRA fest and have 15 Goldes and a lot will be very similar, not particularly exciting and formulaic from a rating sense. Say what you see ... no point in writing war and peace to sex oop a 2.9 raked Vote Golde !
Message FatPhil P beers 26062 º places 995 º 03:03 Tue 9/8/2015 Originally posted by Hippoman "Cask @ Bricklayer’s Arms, Putney SW15. Pours a golden color with a small white head. Has a fruity weak citrus hoppy aroma. Fruity malty weak citrus hoppy flavor. Has a fruity malty citrus hoppy finish." For me a review like that is pointless as it’s as bland as one can be and offers nothing to help fellow drinkers that a pump clip couldn’t. Looking at the results: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Has+a+fruity+weak+citrus+hoppy+aroma%22 Has all the signs of being automatically generated from tick-boxes. That’s one of the techniques that some high-raters use to speed up review-taking. Ticking the relevant boxes is way quicker than writing words. They, robotically as you can see, can be turned into words later. There was once a rater who used to upload his array of ticks (actually scores) rather than converting them to sentences at all. I’d much rather a few bland sentences than a messy grid of X marks (’X’ was his "nothing for this attribute" marker). I’ve never intended my reviews (all words, all the time) to be useful to anyone but myself in the future. I treat almost everyone else’s reviews pretty much the same way. If I desperately need to know about a beer before buying, and my only resource is RB, then I just sort the reviews by score, and look at the lowest raters. Fanbois will never tell you anything useful as tastes all very, I wanna know why people might dislike a beer. Anyway, it may have been a very uninspiring review showing almost no engagement with the beer, but there’s a good chance it was an uninspiring beer that would have offered you no engagement. In which case it was a perfect review, it told you all you need to know.
Message FatPhil P beers 26062 º places 995 º 03:18 Tue 9/8/2015 Originally posted by Hippoman Fair enough. For me writing the review in the best way I can and choosing words to convey as much as possible of the beer drinking experience I’ve had is part of the fun. Presumably English is your native language, and you have a whole host of synonyms with different emphases, modifiers, similies, and metaphors at your fingertips to make your reviews less prosaic? Me too. But for much of the beer-rating activity on the site, at least the parts we’re most likely to see, that’s not the case. That’s not intended as a criticism of the use of English by non-native speakers - to be honest it’s very impressive. And what about beers that aren’t fun. Writing reviews can’t be part of the fun when there’s no fun to have part of!?! Here’s me not having fun: "... Meh aroma, palate, and taste. can’t be bothered to write any more, if they can’t be bothered to put any taste in their beer. ..." "... Drain poured it. Couldn’t be arsed to write a better rating if they can’t be bothered to brew a better beer. ..."

Message RichTheVillan beers 10685 º places 101 º 03:23 Tue 9/8/2015 Originally posted by Hippoman I’m relatively new to this site and doing my best to keep my head down, drinking and rating beer and chatting to enthusiasts about subjects I find interesting when I can. But I have to say, some reviews from the tick-heavy style raters are as good as worthless to me. I stumbled across this today: "Cask @ Bricklayer’s Arms, Putney SW15. Pours a golden color with a small white head. Has a fruity weak citrus hoppy aroma. Fruity malty weak citrus hoppy flavor. Has a fruity malty citrus hoppy finish." For me a review like that is pointless as it’s as bland as one can be and offers nothing to help fellow drinkers that a pump clip couldn’t. For me the overall score tells me more about the beer than reading individual reviews and then calling them out as being pointless, it took me three clicks to find out who this user is. This user has not been on the site since the 1st July, so maybe you’re not worried about upsetting this person.
Message Echon beers 564 º places 12 º 03:29 Tue 9/8/2015 Originally posted by wheresthepath Echon - I note you’re from Denmark, where many of the most profligate raters live. Why not try arranging to meet with Fonefan and some of the other Danish raters so you can see at first hand how they do it and see if you want in? I’m sure they’d be happy to oblige. Well, I wanted to know how they manage all these ratings. That has been explained. I also know that I do not want in on this, and a relatively slow accumulation of rates suits me just fine. Being excited about a great new beer, and savouring that, is what I appreciate. Sometimes I might rate something just for the hell of it if it is really cheap, but I generally want to avoid boring beers. Thousands of ratings will inevitably include lots of dull experiences.
Message Benzai beers 20020 º places 321 º 03:32 Tue 9/8/2015 Originally posted by FatPhil Originally posted by Hippoman "Cask @ Bricklayer’s Arms, Putney SW15. Pours a golden color with a small white head. Has a fruity weak citrus hoppy aroma. Fruity malty weak citrus hoppy flavor. Has a fruity malty citrus hoppy finish." For me a review like that is pointless as it’s as bland as one can be and offers nothing to help fellow drinkers that a pump clip couldn’t. Looking at the results: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Has+a+fruity+weak+citrus+hoppy+aroma%22 Has all the signs of being automatically generated from tick-boxes. That’s one of the techniques that some high-raters use to speed up review-taking. Ticking the relevant boxes is way quicker than writing words. They, robotically as you can see, can be turned into words later. There was once a rater who used to upload his array of ticks (actually scores) rather than converting them to sentences at all. I’d much rather a few bland sentences than a This really sucks imo. At least try to make some difference. Just copy-paste the same des cription is ridiculous. But I’ve seen it being done by other top raters as well. Entering for instance a backlog of 300 golden ales or german hefeweizen and just copy-paste the same general des cription that’s neither completely wrong nor very accurate. Apparently it has been approved, but I think that’s ridiculous and all those ratings should be converted to ticks. Perhaps quite some ratings of mine are quite similar too, since beers in some styles just are very similar, but at least I always write an honest review and I try to describe the beer as good as I can and never just copy-paste a general des cription.
Message Hippoman beers 645 º places 12 º 05:58 Tue 9/8/2015 Yes, I did notice that the user that wrote that particular review hasn’t been online for months so I thought it was safe to use that particular example without offending anyone. English is indeed my native language so I guess I’m lucky to be able to use all sorts of words and des criptive techiques that might not come as easily to users from other countries. That being said the general standard of English from overseas raters on this site has always struck me as excellent. I fully take the point about needing to be excited by a beer to be inspired to write anything more than a bare-bones, functional review. Personally I enjoy reviewing the beers I don’t like as much as the ones I do, I find it fun to try and find ways to describe their failings. But I suppose more prolific raters than me may not feel like they have the time or inclination to write more varied negative/neutral reviews over and over again. I agree that the review I singled out was quite likely of an example of an uninspiring beer and that the user didn’t feel driven to write anything more that a stripped-down, very basic des cription of it. If that’s the case though I don’t see why they couldn’t at least take a second to add some sort of qualitative opinion, like "This was uninspiring and bland" to their review.

Message FatPhil P beers 26062 º places 995 º 07:04 Tue 9/8/2015 Indeed. Horrors can be absolutely as much fun to review as world-class beers, even if they’re infinitely less fun to drink. It’s the middling ones that are the least fun to review. And on "reviews that don’t actually tell you much", I just typed in a rerate of a beer, the previous review of which was: "Wow, wow, wow - blackberry - wow, wow, wow, blackberry, smooth, wow, yum. More please." Am I a bad reviewer? ;-)
Message Maakun beers 10309 º places 319 º 07:59 Tue 9/8/2015 Originally posted by Hippoman what use is referring to beer as tasting like malt/hops? Here’s a sentence from one of your own reviews (but could have easily been one of mine): "Taste is surprisingly sweet with caramel malts and some floral hop." Caramel malts and floral hops are quite generic des criptors, but often very true and for bland beers there’s often not that much more too it. I agree with Benzai though, it’s always nice to add some general impression or something, and just copying ratings should be frowned upon.
Message Travlr beers 33910 º places 4591 º 08:18 Tue 9/8/2015 ^^^ also, the more beers you’ve rated, the less you have to say about any particular beer, especially a bland one. even non-bland beers offer a challenge: rating east coast IPAs I’m running out of ways to say "fruity."