Why skew the numbers?

Gotta vent.

I hate it when I see someone semi-rave about a beer in their review and then rate it a 2.5. "Rock solid! - (2.5)." I also can’t stand it when I see someone give a beer a 4.2 and their verbiage points to the exact opposite.

Do people think they’re holding themselves to a higher standard?. Do they think that others respect them more for being curve-busters? Yo, all you’re doing is skewing the numbers.

In the beginning, I would score what I now consider a "pretty good beer" way too high. I was awarding 4.0s like they were going out of style. Plus, back then, everything "craft" was great, because it was different. It was fresh. It had flavor. I was unknowingly skewing the stats.

After several hundred ratings, I realized that I needed to adapt, since the rest of the site wasn’t going to adapt to my silly scale.

There shouldn’t be people with "Avg Score Given: 2.25 - Avg Beer Rated: 3.44." No, it’s not the end of the world. People can do whatever they want. But why do it? People don’t admire you for it. It actually lessens your credibility.

With the risk of sounding fascist, socialistic or communistic here: ADAPT! Please?

BTW, if you don’t really like beer, then your scores are probably right where they need to be. Just don’t go confusing people with "AWESOME AWESOME BREW! - (3.1)" or "A major disappointment! - (4.2)." No one is impressed by that.

OK, vocal minority. Let me have it, but be gentle about it. I chafe easily.

I think we all have our own system in our heads, most are average but some are over generous and some over harsh. Im cool with it if its consistent. But id not be surprised if some people try game the system. Its human nature

I’d say the majority of users fail to use the whole scale as well, but maybe that’s a different topic.

Maybe start by going back and re-rating your old scores first? I don’t see the point in trying to bag on other raters when you admit that you’ve done it and haven’t ’corrected’ the issue.

There are likely enough harsh/generous raters to balance out anyway, isn’t that the idea behind crowd sourcing data? Everything will end up as a bell in the long run.

I really think it tends to be very subjective to the user. Not everyone sees an "average" beer as a 2.5. If you looked at it like school grades, a 2.5 would be an F (50%). Everyone has their own standards and way of seeing the scale. It can also fall on tastes. I rarely find a beer I don’t like to some extent and when I do find a beer I don’t care for, it’s usually not horrible and worthy of the lowest score possible. This alone probably makes my perception of "average" a bit higher than others might have theirs. I don’t know man.

I have to wonder if this is just an optimist/pessimist difference. Exaggerating/generalizing slightly: an optimist will point to the aspects he/she likes. A pessimist will do the opposite. And their scores will reflect that.

Venting is good. The petty risks taken by forum venting quicken the blood, so much needed to soak up those beery sugars & proteins. Then again, the individual ratings are just numbers and one man’s scene’s perfect 100 beer might ruin the night of another man’s Perfect Ten.

I personally use 4+ as a kind of mental shorthand for "need to actively seek out again or buy in bulk someday" and believe that people whose spincter starts to tremor at the thought of having to hand out a higher figure than a 3.9 suffer from undigested protestant heritage issues and might be subconsciously fascist nobfiddlers, - but that’s just my OldWorld private theory.

Nice term, curve-busters. Deliberate and malign, harmless and brotastically unconscious curve busters, high and low, make up the RB microcosm, a mirror of the non-beery universe filled with more sad and happy bastards.

More than scores and numbers, I like and use this site to peruse ratings by personalities whose vocabulary extends beyond awesome, rare and body is medium, carbonation is soft. People with a real-life pulse, a personal compass for quality and style sensitivity more generous than their regional scene or ticking matrices, quoi.

I rate using the Robert Parker wine scale.
.5 thru 3.5 is a drainpour.
3.6 thru 3.9 is minimally passable.
4.0+ is acceptable

Originally posted by Homer321
I’d say the majority of users fail to use the whole scale as well, but maybe that’s a different topic.

As someone who’s fairly new to rating according to the RB scale, or really rating beers at all outside of a very personal scale of how much I’d like to have a beer again, I think maybe an official clarification of the rating scales might be in order.
By simply reading this thread, and even more so by reading reviews of a few different beers, it becomes obvious that a clarification is much needed, and, though I might overreach here, overdue. English not being my first language, I had great use for the explainations provided for the different sub-parts of the rating in order to determine what was appropriate to contemplate for aroma, what for overall and so forth. While this was very useful I still lacked a common ground to base my scale upon. This lead to me having to make up my own scale, much like I expect others had to in the early days of their RB carreers as well. As it would seem, I rate somewhat lower than the average user, but I ’m not sure this means I should adjust my scale to better fit that of the average rater. In order for such an adjustment to be meaningful a clarification of the scale would be needed - and until such a clarification is provided adjustments of personal scales would not be meaningful.
Maybe this topic could be used to determine how to harmonize our rating scales?

(I apologize for any spelling/grammar mistakes as well as for anything unclear in my post. It’s rather late here, I’m posting from an iPad and drinking while doing so.)

I will occasionally find myself annoyed by this kind of thing, but then I remember the majority of the site’s user-generated content is contributed by high-functioning alcoholics, and suddenly the stakes don’t seem so high!