| bartyMJ joined | |
|---|---|
On the odd occasion I look at my own profile and the pie chart at the side which shows proportion of genres listened to etc. As a result I've seen my own 'trust rank' occasionally. At some point in the past it was 6 (which may have been brief!), but today it is 4. Not that I need to be seen as the oracle of music but just to Mike or whoever else may judge such things, if the above has happened appreciate if someone could tell me why as I don't want to be unknowingly doing anything that is having a negative impact on what is a very good and valuable site for my discovery of prog and music in general! | |
| Mike joined | |
Yes, this is a difficult topic. Currently it's only me who can edit trust rank, and I did reduce yours from 6 to 4 a while ago. My main reason for it was that I've seen several really low ratings of metal releases which are generally seen as iconic masterpieces of the genre. While I don't mind your ratings as honest expressions of how you see these albums, I also think that these ratings are not particularly helpful for the typical visitor of the website, who most likely does not share your aversion against growling vocals. Sometimes it seems like you're rating the genre more than the specific release. What do you think? What would be your criteria for a trust rank ranging from 1 to 10? This is in a nutshell how I am trying to rank it:
| |
| anonymous user | |
yeah i noticed i had a 6 briefly some time ago, but was quickly brought back to a 4. honestly i don't think the deweighting based on occasional, nor even oft contrarian views is fair, especially if there is logic or reason behind such ratings. i think as long as the user is rating in good faith, even if you and/or the conventional consensus disagree with their opinion, they should have the prestige of an equally veteran user. I'm not just expressing this because you disagree with my detest for loud masters, but it would seem you'll never "promote" me if that is the case... critics not only should be allowed to disagree with the masses, but some need to in order to prevent an echo chamber from forming. Ultimately, that form of restriction boils down to "I agree with the users' rating," and not "this user is using the site responsibly." if you look at my ratings, you'll see consistency in that my highest rated releases are typically doomier and gloomier, and drone or sludge-oriented, in the realm of metal, or "far-out" and/or lush, and fairly reverb-heavy in the non-metal realm, whereas i gravitate away from more barebones and simple stuff that take a more melodically accessible approach (that's why i typically do not like the British pop/alt rock stuff like Oasis). There are some exceptions ofc, such as Billy Joel's Piano Man, which has somehow snuck it's way into my A-tier for all these years... but I don't think it's right to invalidate my different tastes because I don't typically gravitate towards the "iconic" stuff. Remember that I have put hours, if not days, into using this site, significantly more than a "newbie" who had the same 4 as me. It doesn't feel very grateful, tbh, especially when another person with a higher rating comes into a release I carefully and thoughtfully rated, and then they nullify my opinion completely, which basically means it was time wasted. That is something I wanted to bring up, but haven't gotten around to until now... also, the hierarchy you've set up in the polls section of the site is very off-putting to me. Especially using the term "newbie," which can be seen as insulting. | |
| bartyMJ joined | |
OK. I do completely understand your logic because I know when you hold something in high regard it's very frustrating when someone else doesn't. But music preferences are very subjective and this whole process relies on people having different opinions - have to agree with part of what Bardberic says above, judging who you believe to be the typical visitor of the site and putting less faith in someone who doesn't share their view is in danger of creating an echo chamber. But at the same time for what it's worth I believe the descriptors for your trust rank ratings are absolutely reasonable - it's perhaps the context element of a '6' that I guess we would maybe have varying opinions on the importance of? There's a few things I can point to which I hope at least show that I'm trying to look at things with some genuine effort to differentiate between good and bad rather than just a blanket bad mark against a genre - or at the very least give some detail so you can tell me how I should be using the site better (as above it's a brilliant resource and I want to be contributing to it constructively).
As I say, all the above is just to try and help to make sure I'm contributing to the site in a positive manner while still using it subjectively, please do let me know if something needs to change. | |
| Mike joined | |
Many things to talk about here. The most important first: I have moved both of you back to trust rank 6. I appreciate the hard work you are putting into this, and I can see the consistency in both your approaches. Having said that, I still have my problems with your occasional low ratings. It's not just because I personally disagree with them, it's that they fly in the face of a broader consensus. Taking Rust in Peace as an example, it is widely regarded to be one of the top 10 single best metal albums ever made. That does not mean that you have to like it, but as a (semi-)professional reviewer I think that your rating should at least acknowledge the status of these releases. Specifically, a D-tier rating does not seem appropriate to me for such an album merely because you don't enjoy listening to it. For a true D-tier rating I imagine that you could name, from the top of your head, at least a handful of releases which are in the same style/genre but orders of magnitude better than that release. I doubt you could do that, but of course I could be wrong there. If you can, then I would like to hear those releases. If you can't, it would confirm my suspicion that you are really rating the genre, not the specific release. Put another way: The overall consensus for Rust in Peace in the metal community is S-tier. If you really don't enjoy listening to it, for whatever reason, I can see going down to A, B or even C tier. D/E-Tier just sounds indefensibly low to me. To emphasize my point above: You are free to assign whichever rating you want, I just think that it becomes less and less helpful when it is too much based on personal preference when there is a really strong overall consensus on the release. Abstaining from rating is another approach I have occasionally used. We could also implement something in the system which you could use to show to visitors that the rating is unusually subjective (e.g. labelling it as a "guilty pleasure" for positive biases, or as the opposite - can't think of an antonym for "guilty pleasure" right now). Let's say that trust rank level 6 allows for these types of ratings, provided they are consistent :-) | |
| bartyMJ joined | |
For what it's worth I don't consider myself anything close to a semi-professional reviewer. I'm very much a casual but keen enjoyer of music, every review is pretty much off gut feel. I can't play an instrument, I can't sing, I've never studied music. I'm just picking up a random album and deciding whether I like it or not. Maybe that simple fact means that the 'trust' placed in me shouldn't be very high at all! But I really have to disagree with the fact that I should be rating things higher purely because a certain community would do so. If I use a different example and perhaps a quite obvious one, the work of Genesis. The prog community will generally rate Selling England in the S-tier and Invisible Touch in the D-Tier (going by ProgArchives). The popular music community would do pretty much the opposite (going by chart success). Which one of those is correct? I would argue there's no such thing, it is just a matter of personal preference. Saying that I don't like something, but I have to rate it higher because other people do (or might do) means ratings aren't personal, and therefore what's the point in people giving them? If you don't believe that the D tier is appropriate because you don't enjoy listening to it then you need to change the descriptor listed on your own site. Firstly the adjective used, 'Decent', where I am in the UK (and this is possibly a regional thing here in North London) is actually used far more as a term of positivity than I think you intend it to be. But that's just a semantics thing so probably not much to be done about that. It's more the detailed sentence: "This is music you would not want to listen to if given a choice, but you cannot really call it bad either, and the musicians involved are actually trying to make this sound good." This to me is exactly what I've done with the example of Rust In Peace. I personally would not listen to it if given a choice but I do recognise there is some skill and talent involved in it. The B-tier is "This is playlist material. You really enjoy listening to this, but you are not doing so regularly because there is other music which is still better.". If I rated it here, it would be a complete lie, so what would be the point? But ignoring that point for now, and on to whether I'm rating the genre rather than the specific release... how specific a genre are we talking about here? Metal as a whole, thrash metal, or some kind of combination of the more extreme end of style of metal? And how is anyone's ratings not in some way affected by personal preferences and biases towards certain sub-genres or traits in music? If I am specifically being asked for the thrash metal albums I consider better, then I don't have much to go on as my general preference against it means I haven't explored it in depth. Metallica's And Justice for All and Ride the Lightning I think are marginally better and a handful of tracks from both do sometimes feature on playlists - however they are probably the least thrash tracks (e.g. For Whom the Bell Tolls). Its probably unsurprising that my favourite Opeth album is Heritage, and I enjoy Pale Communion and Watershed, but very little of their output before that time. That's obviously based on them shifting towards the more melodic end of metal but the variation in my ratings for their albums I hope at least shows I've listened and put some thought in rather than just listen to Blackwater Park and immediately just dismiss them as a death metal band and downvote their entire output. I was surprised to find I quite enjoyed Book 2 from Others By No One when it came out. Generally not in my comfort zone as quite avant-garde metal and pretty harsh at times, but enough for me to give it 14/20. Which when I get round to backdating and uploading ratings here is an A. That is at least an example of me listening to something which on paper doesn't look like I will enjoy, but I've given it a chance and have happily found something I like. The argument here really is that everyone to a certain extent is rating things based on what genre it is, particularly if you're talking about specific sub-genres, as that is ultimately what builds people's preferences for what they're going to listen to. | |
| bartyMJ joined | |
Extra thought - I can also potentially provide an explanation if it looks like I have recently "targeted" certain bands with my ratings. That's in the order I've been adding my 'pre-listened & rated' albums from the few years before using this site. Every so often I've been using the recommendation mode on the chart page to choose something new. When I've spotted something I've already rated myself, I've clicked through to the artist page and added my ratings for all their albums I've listened to so they don't appear in the recommendation mode. So it is done in blocks of artists (and therefore also sub-genres). Yesterday I added my ratings for The Soft Machine, Tangerine Dream, Unexpect, Airbag and Indukti in that way. I'm not targeting anything specific, its just my way of retrospectively adding my ratings over time (these are also ones I haven't written blurbs for as many I believe are not fresh enough in my memory to do so). Many of them I would also come back to over time and update if needed. | |
| Mike joined | |
Regarding your example with Genesis: Usually pop music fans would abstain from rating classic Prog-era Genesis releases. If they did, and gave a D-Tier rating to Selling England, I would find that equally strange. To any prog fan - who isn't only biased towards the genre but also a little more knowledgeable on the music - it would appear nonsensical, since it is widely regarded as a masterpiece. Personally I don't really like it, but I think I rated it as a B+. Peter Gabriel's whiny vocals don't sit well with me, so my rating is dragged down by this bias. Regarding your interpretation of the D-Tier as a recommendation because the word "decent" has a positive connotation: I think it's a euphemism for saying "mediocre" or "average". Numerically, a 5-6/10 rating is not a favorable thing. Well, maybe depends on what you're rating. If it's a release by a local, not widely known band, it could be seen as favorable. If it's a release that is frequently featured in top 10 all times best albums polls, it's not very flattering. And sure, we all have our biases and our ratings differ, sometimes a lot, on the same albums. That's what makes websites like this one interesting! I'm just saying that in my opinion extremely biased ratings are less helpful than those which are a bit moderated by taking into account how releases are considered by the larger community of fans. You're welcome to disagree! | |
| Mike joined | |
I think the problem with the rating scale is that a single number cannot express what we are describing here. For example, imagine that you could submit two ratings for a release: first a completely subjective rating, which ignores all the context - just how much you like the release, on a scale from 1 to 10. But then also an objective rating, where you try to ignore all your personal biases and focus only on how great the release is (to a hypothetical entirely neutral listener). This would improve things, but probably it would be cumbersome to do on a regular basis. Another way would be to enable a rater to add some context info along with the rating, like a bias indicator, or some hint towards why the rating is so low (or high), like "guilty pleasure" or "dislike the genre". | |
| bartyMJ joined | |
To clarify, I don't believe the D tier is a 'recommendation' at all. What I am saying is that to anyone living in a similar area to me, sociolinguistics mean that my (our) interpretation of the word 'decent' is a slightly more positive one than it clearly is for you. Its just a quirk of how English is used in different places! So, rather than use that to assess ratings I use the longer descriptors that are less open to interpretation. Again: "This is music you would not want to listen to if given a choice, but you cannot really call it bad either, and the musicians involved are actually trying to make this sound good." That exactly describes how I feel about the particular album we've referenced a few times, so do you want me to follow it, or to contradict your own rating description? I don't disagree at all that extremely biased ratings are less helpful. What I disagree with is that my ratings are extremely biased. If they were, I would simply be saying Thrash Metal = Bad and rating everything in that sub-genre from 1-4. But I haven't. Despite not personally enjoying an album I've listened to it in its entirety and identified that there is some skill, talent and importance and given it an above average rating. That's surely not extremely biased. An entirely objective rating.... this is a complete impossibility. At least for me anyway. How am I supposed to know or guess what a hypothetical entirely neutral listener would think? In fact wouldn't an entirely neutral listener just be completely neutral towards everything, as rating anything requires actually having some kind of benchmark to compare to! The idea of adding a bias indicator I guess would work a bit and I would use it where I can but many people are either unaware of their own biases or actually do want to manipulate things and hide that. I think given all the difficulties, a rating scale can only ever be subjective. I love this site and how it functions which is why I've spent time putting bits into it. And I still appreciate all your hard work that goes into it. But it's really difficult from all you've said here not to feel a bit singled out purely because I've dared to dislike something you hold in high regard. A very quick and easy search and the site is littered with non-conforming ratings both at the low end and giving '10s', from users with trust ratings as high as 8. I thought maybe it was obvious that I'm a casual music listener rather than someone who is sitting down specifically to listen to and thoroughly review an album, and would totally have accepted that as a reason to be considered less trustworthy than a professional reviewer. Its a lot harder to accept that my rating was dropped because without asking me if it was the case you've assumed I'm deliberately crashing an entire genre. And the only reason that we've been able to discuss it is because I happened to notice and asked. | |
| bartyMJ joined | |
The positive thing that works well to counter however you feel about the above is the aggregate weighting system. If my personal view on an album is quite different to the general one of a few others, then whether I rate it as a D, E or F, as far as I understand it, will be very unlikely to affect the overall rating for that album. So, provided I don't write a blurb/comment slamming the album, it's very hard for my counter-opinion to even be noticed by another user of the site, they would almost have to search for it specifically. Of course there could be albums that haven't received many ratings that it would effect but then generally they aren't going to be ones that have a high status in the music world anyway. So surely its totally possible for the rating system to be subjective as high status albums will generally withstand the occasional differing viewpoint anyway? | |
| Mike joined | |
^ The rating system should always be subjective. Like I said above, it would be really boring if all the ratings were "objective", because then they would be identical. Ok, I can understand that the fact that I adjusted your trust rank without asking you pissed you off. I'll think about how to change the system so that users can add more context for extreme ratings. Returning to what I said above, there are some releases which I have given a lower rating than they "deserve" according to general consensus. Would be nice to be able to add a hint as to the underlying reasons. | |
| bartyMJ joined | |
I'm still confused as to why you'd consider an above average rating to be extreme, but its clearly understandably affected by the main example being something you hold in very high regard. Have to admit I get the impression that if we were talking about a different genre and a seminal album within that, there wouldn't be an issue. Apologies if that isn't the case. As above, adjusting my trust rank without asking didn't piss me off in itself, there are many ways I'd totally understand it because I'm fully aware I'm not an expert and often don't really know what I'm talking about! Its that up to now I thought I'd been contributing in a way that benefited, taking the time to write short pieces about what I've listened to and engaging with this forum over the last couple of years. But despite that I've just been judged to have been deliberately misusing the site because I do not share the same biases towards a genre as its creator, and its not been discussed its just been assumed. Just let me know what you want me to do. If I listen to a thrash metal album and don't like it and notice everyone else does, maybe I'll just keep my opinion to myself next time. As I keep saying, I really like this site as a way of exploring lots of new music and only want to be using it in the right way. I guess reading this thread won't be particularly good for new users to read either - if you wanted to delete it, fully with you. | |
| Mike joined | |
Let's not escalate the drama any further. You both are valuable (and valued) members of this website. We discussed the criteria, I moved your trust rank back to 6. I will not delete the thread for quite some time, let's take a pause and reflect. You are free to leave or stay, and if you want my advice, I suggest you keep submitting whatever ratings you think are appropriate. Maybe I will introduce split ratings (one completely subjective, the other one objective). Probably not necessary most of the time, but I can think of some releases which I would rate much lower subjectively than I feel I should when I'm trying to be objective. Could be a fun experiment. The overall rating would be the average of the two. Would that influence some of your ratings? For instance, you gave Death - Symbolic an F rating. Would that change when using the split ratings? Your subjective rating would probably still be an F, but how would an objective rating look like where you try to ignore your biases? For me, using Genesis - Selling England as an example, my subjective rating would be high C-Tier while the objective rating would be low S-Tier, probably resulting in a low B-Tier rating. | |
| bartyMJ joined | |
I won't be leaving Mike, you've created such a great resource for exploring music and one difference of opinion won't change that. At the very least having used it regularly for a couple of years I want to be able to contribute constructively, so apologies for the tone of some of the above! I will continue to submit ratings subjectively but will do my best to at least consider whether the album I'm rating is a defining moment for a genre as part of that. I have deleted a couple of blurbs which on reflection offer nothing other than my dislike of a style rather than any useful detail about the album (and that's actually not isolated to thrash metal) so hopefully anything that's a clear personal taste and done 'rating-only' is less impactful than where I'm picking out the pros and cons in a 'normal' blurb. It may be an interesting experiment for objective ratings for sure and there are cases where I'd absolutely be able to give a very low rating for my subjective tastes and a very high one for the 'status' of the album. I suppose the difficulty will be that I know my own knowledge of music has massive holes in it, there are many areas of prog and beyond that I've only recently discovered. So there will be times I listen to an album, don't like it, and move on, and have no idea at all that if I'd taken the time to do some basic research, it would be considered a defining moment in musical history. So I guess an objective rating works but only if you're confident you know the background of an artist and album. It's also probably only useful for albums/artists from a good few years back as its only then you really know where the long term status is? You've given a perfect example to consider with Death though I think. The F rating for Symbolic is one of those 'backdated' ones where I'm transferring over things from my earliest use of ProgArchives to discover new music in 2020. At that time, I would be pretty ignorant of who the big players in death metal were (despite the band name!) other than the fact that album was rated fairly highly on PA. It was so far from my comfort zone, I quickly gave it 1 star, and I moved on. Since then, my taste in music has definitely broadened (although I would say still unlikely to enjoy Symbolic or much of Death!) and I also now at least know how important they were to a genre's development despite my dislike for it. As its been 5 years and my appreciation of music has definitely changed since, there is a case for me to re-listen to Symbolic to see if it changes my rating too! But I can't say I'm looking forward to it ;-) So... in that particular case I would be able to give an objective rating much higher than my subjective one, although I think I'd struggle to be 'accurate' with whether it should be an S, A, or B - it would pretty much be judged based on some other expert reviews or even what something like wikipedia says! But even if I was to go as low as a B if the split rating is 50:50 subjective vs objective that would probably mean a D which probably reflects more accurately to the tier descriptors. Not sure whether weighting them 50:50 would be right or whether that needs tweaking because presumably a lot of subjective ratings do already give some thought to objectivity too as that's how you've set it up already. The personal difficulty would be that for many artists and albums I'd have even less general knowledge than I do with Death to be able to give a reliable objective rating. And quite often I'd imagine if I/you listen to something for the first time and aren't a fan of it, you're unlikely to be enthusiastic about looking into the background of it in order to be objective. That said I'm keen to make sure if I'm a regular user of the site I'm using it properly so I would try. Particularly for the areas such as thrash/death where it's clear and obvious my strong dislike of the common style themes mean I don't have the 'ear' to be able to differentiate easily between a technically good and bad album. Plus, if it all links back to trustworthiness, it makes perfect sense that those with a good and broad knowledge of musical history and the objective status of artists/albums within genres should be considered more trustworthy than the likes of myself who don't! | |
| Logan joined | |
There are so many features of this site that I have not wrapped my head around -- can't even see how to review or write blurbs now. I wanted to review some Fishmans albums here with short reviews as I had written much longer ones for Prog Archives but not seeing the feature (might be my browser settings...) I would rather rate explicitly from a subjective stance. We all have biases, and I don't like the idea of others who also have biases determining how much I can be trusted in my ratings. And I don't think that makes this site seem tolerant, open and amiable, and one might question the benevolence, impartiality and omniscience of those who would determine such things. I do believe in giving the benefit of the doubt commonly as a matter of civility and grace, and of course if people feel valued, appreciated and liked, they are more likely to want to contribute. By the way, the benefit of explicitly subjective ratings is that it recognises bias, it recognises individual tastes, and by looking at users sincere appreciation of albums one might find others who share similar tastes. It does help when you have a very robust user-base. Lots of rules and expectations can be confusing and off-putting. | |
| bartyMJ joined | |
Occasionally my browser drops the blurb/comment boxes below the ratings & tabs bars on an album page rather than them being alongside - if that helps at all. I'll leave the rest for Mike, I've probably said more than my piece! | |
| Logan joined | |
Thanks, I should try another browser, although this Firefox one remembers me and I am so out of it these days that I forget my password (remembering my own name is hard enough, could be the allergies). I had wondered if it might be a permissions thing, but I wrote various little reviews many years ago. | |
| anonymous user | |
Logan, I am using a customized and partiality self-modded fork of Firefox, based on older source code and it works fine on this site. To review an album, you click on the album, go to the edit tab, add a familiarity level, and the blurb/comment boxes should open. The comment box is for the review. Try this by clicking on my Black Holes and Revelations profile picture, and clicking on the "launch the editor" hyperlink at the top | |
| Logan joined | |
^ Thanks. {And I just published my little review of a Fishmans live album} |