Reviews

Yeah, coming from me this is sort of ironic, because I don;t review. Mostly because I can;t keep attention of it, put it off, and if I do would be hated by the writers, and I don;t feel like putting myself pout of the way to be hated. But this isn't complaining about reviews, and how we shouldn't have them, because that's just idiotic.

I recently went to the leader boards, and decided to see how the top reviewers review, maybe get some ideas how to be better. And they are all stubs. Most are just making the minimum to be counted. I don;t really think that someone who barley puts the effort into the review should be featured as the best review of the month, if someone is doing it like that they either want to post something on the site, or want the attention of being on the leader boards and being so "helpful".

I would say maybe a review rating system for a future idea, where one could rate a review, if its simple that is. Probably isn't. Maybe if its possible make reviews that count on the boards need to be longer? Like a higher requirement to be featured, and while keeping the lower one for new comers who want to post something, or don;t really know how to review that well.

So that's my two cents.

Heh Bolt, if you want to get ideas on how to better at reviews, then go to the YWS section of the knowledge base. There's a good article there on critiquing poetry by Cade, another on what is a good critique by Snoink, and yet one more on what isn't a good critique by Suzanne. All three are worth reading.

I have noticed a higher number of short reviews, and it's something I've already brought up in the moderator forums. I think there's probably a lot of reasons behind it besides just leaderboards though; after all, some excellent critiquers have even been writing short reviews as of late.

In any case, I've brought up the idea of rating reviews once before, and it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Besides, I think in order for something like that to work well, you need a lot more user activity than what you have at YWS currently. Plus, it's not too easy to set up unfortunately.

On making only long reviews count on the boards, I think that'd just introduce too much confusion. Besides, it doesn't really address the underlying problem. It just kind of sweeps the problem under the rug.

What you have instead are two problems: (1) the increasing proliferation of short reviews coming off the incredible January period, and (2) leaderboard spam. The two are related, but distinct enough that they should be treated separately.

On the first, part of the issue is simply that January was an incredible month for reviews here at YWS. After the month was over, I think a lot of people were simply burned out and February/March turned into the hangover period. On top of that, take into account that March is just a terrible month all around. It's the longest period of the year without a holiday, and it also tends to be quite cloudy during the month. So people are cranky.

So part of the problem may be fixed simply by the fact that we're now going into April, which tends to be a much better month. To fix the rest, I think topics like this one help to just highlight the fact that we need to always work on improving our style of reviewing. Plus, if you see a bad review, please report it! That way, a JM can get in touch with the reviewer and help him/her out.

On the second issue of leaderboard spam, one solution may be to stop counting Art/Photography comments as reviews. Most comments in that forum tend to be short affairs and seem to be designed to get just over the 250 character limit.

Another solution may be to come up with a weighted leaderboard score. Instead of counting each review as equal, it could possibly be changed to take length into account as well. There's a few reasons why that'd still be imperfect, but perhaps a weighted leaderboard score on the basis of length would help to deter some of the spam.

All in all, looking forward to hearing what people say.

Maybe there could be a Karma-like system where you can give someone a point if they do a really good review.

Merlin34 wrote:Maybe there could be a Karma-like system where you can give someone a point if they do a really good review.

YWO have something like that where you can 'thank' a member (not specifically for reviews, but I assume that's a large part of it). I guess it's a little bit like donating points or sending a gift, but you can immediately see how many times a member has been thanked. Could be something to think about?

YWO is also a lot smaller than YWS; on a good day, there might be 10 reviews posted total and many days don't have more than a few. YWS is just too large to effectively administer a thanking system for reviews.

Quite honestly, I think what works the best are users mentoring users. If you see someone doing really short reviews, then contact them about it (in a very friendly manner). If you don't have time to do that, then just report the review and a JM or mod will take care of it. Otherwise, you start getting into complicated Rube Goldberg esque devices that are either too easily abused or just don't work well after the first couple weeks. From my experience, it's always been never make things more complex than they need to be.

Nate wrote:YWO is also a lot smaller than YWS; on a good day, there might be 10 reviews posted total and many days don't have more than a few. YWS is just too large to effectively administer a thanking system for reviews.

Quite honestly, I think what works the best are users mentoring users. If you see someone doing really short reviews, then contact them about it (in a very friendly manner). If you don't have time to do that, then just report the review and a JM or mod will take care of it. Otherwise, you start getting into complicated Rube Goldberg esque devices that are either too easily abused or just don't work well after the first couple weeks. From my experience, it's always been never make things more complex than they need to be.

Fair enough.

Another problem with the thank/rating for reviews is for new members. A lot of the new members, among others, is that they usually don;t take kindly to criticism. They don;t like being told they aren't perfect, amazing writers and deny it when people try and tell them about it. So Rating or thanking reviews would make a lot of good reviews go unnoticed, because the person would think it is a terrible and 100% wrong review, rate it low/not thank it, then rate the "OMG I lurve this, just clean up a few things and it could be the new Twilight " the max, and thank it to the ceiling.

And for mentoring, I've seen people be in the chat room, and the conversation will be about how short reviews are bad, and to take time and actually be helpful, they will agree and then the next review they do is the minimum amount. While this isn't as personal and direct, it is sort of a problem with the idea. Maybe if someone is told one on one to make them longer they will, but it might need to be a constant reminder as well for some people. Not to say it won;t or can't work well for some, or even everyone eventually, just noting some problems that I think might come.

The problem with that sort of mindset is that long reviews aren't always helpful and short reviews aren't always unhelpful. Frankly, some of the longer reviews are tediously repetitious. And some of them are very unhelpful... you can discourage someone into not writing. And the longer your critique is, even if it's tediously repetitious, the more discouraging (and thusly unhelpful) it can be.

And this is kind of my fault... I pretty much invented the long critique on YWS and made it as popular as it is. But I recently took a class about writing for engineers, and they basically forced us to write memos. Basically? Instead of rambling pointlessly on for pages and pages about whatever, we had to sum up the key points of improvement for our critiques and offer constructive advice to improve those key points. And I think this is a much more efficient way of writing critiques.

So here's some advice:

1. Welcome or say hello to the writer.

2. Tell the writer what his poem reminded you of and what you thought about it, in general.

3. Tell the writer the main points that he has to improve on.

4. Give constructive ideas on how to fix those main points.

5. Sum up those points and thank the writer for posting.

And this, really, is a solid critique. It can be short, it can be long, but as long as you have all of these elements in it, it's a good critique.

My system is basically the same as Snoink's, but being the grammar nazi I am, I like to do a whole list of nitpicks as well.

As for why it's happening lately, I think a lot of the better reviewers- and a lot of members on the site in general- have just been too busy. And, apparently, it's cloudy (it's cloudy all year round here, Mr. Chimp?), and just in general it's not been a great month on YWS. I agree that January was indeed a fantastic month, and March has slumped a bit.

And the simple solution:

The best thing you can do to improve reviewing on YWS is do good reviews yourself!

My English teacher once said that if you thought something wasn't worth reading, don't bother handing it in. Perhaps the same policy applies: always try and write the type of review you would like to get. Always remember the person on the receiving end rather than just how many points it'll get you or if it will shift your review count. Those are just incentives to get people to review, but they shouldn't be your main motive. Your main motive should be that warm glow doing a good review gives you.

-Stella x

I'm in the middle of an exam period so lately my reviews are only telling the reader my feedback. Whether or not this meets the 250 character borderline doesn't particularly concern me.

The most important thing is though, that even the shortest of reviews can sometimes be far more useful than a 5000 character nitpick review.