What I find troubling about PN's Critique forum...

... is the rating system. Unlike most posters I don't find anything

wrong with the mechanics of the rating system, but I do find that

numerical [and anonymous!] ratings conflict with [what should be] the

purpose of a Critique(ing) Forum. <p>

 

Personally, when I request a Critique - I'm looking for a critique -

not a numerical, anonymous ranking. Numbers that represent

nondescript words like "good" or "bad" are meaningless to me and

cannot offer any help, education, advice, or even criticisms; they

can only offer simple praise, disapproval, or placement in a PN "top"

page.<p>

 

Critique by definition means:<br>

A critical review or commentary, especially one dealing with works of

art or literature. A critical discussion of a specified topic. The

art of criticism. <p>

 

Thesaurus finds for Critique: <br>

Examination, inquiry, investigation, study, report, analysis.<p>

 

Criticism by definition means:<br>

The act or art of judging and defining the merits of a scientific or

artistic work; the principles or method of judging works of art.<p>

 

Thesaurus finds for Criticism: <br>

Faultfinding, reproach, carping, comment, note, commentary, study,

notice, critique, analysis, and review.<p>

 

I think that our Critique Forum should not include numerical

rankings, while I would expect a Rating Forum to include them. So

ideally IMO, there should be separate forums for rating and

critiquing - allowing those of us who enjoy receiving/giving ratings

to do so in a designated forum, and to allow those of us who enjoy

giving/receiving comments to do so in a designated forum. As the

Critique forum stands, I don't feel that the two fit well together

because lots of people [including myself at times] take PN's easy way

out and rate, rather than comment. IMO, in a Critique Forum

comments/criticisms should be encouraged before ratings. It is hard

[judging from posts in this forum] for many of us to actually gain a

true "Critique" [including comments, criticism, analysis - and

everything in-between] from the Critique Forum. <p>

 

I've read the Brian is working on a no-ratings option for subscribers

who request a critique. Hopefully this new feature will solve the

problem. But I still believe that the rating system, as its coupled

with the Critiquing system, could benefit from some modifications.

<p>

 

Just my thoughts.

Typo correction: I've read THAT Brian is working on a no-ratings option...

Why should I, or anyone else, critique your work?

Carl Root wrote: Why should I or anyone else critique your work?<p>

 

Well, I think if your surfing the *Critique* Forum, and you are asked to make a critique, you ought to CRITIQUE work - whether it be mine or anyone else's. You should visit the critique forum to CRITIQUE. If someone asks for a comment, and you don't want to add one, then don't - your under no obligation. :-)<p>

 

Carl: Why shouldn't you critique my work? <p>

Maybe you don't want to. Great. Please don't, I would hate to trouble you. After all, Carl, the critique forum isn't about critiquing images, right? I mean, why on earth would you want to critique an image in the critique forum, especially after someone has kindly asked for your feedback?

I wrote: If someone asks for a comment, and you don't want to add one, then don't - your under no obligation.

 

I should have added:

 

... - you're under no obligation, but don't go ahead and rate if the person has asked for comments.

 

With the new option that Brian is going to add soon, this should not be an issue any longer. If a subscriber wants comments-only, than that's what they'll hopefully get.

 

But I will still feel that the ratings system is *almost* totally useless for critiquing.

Carl, that is a good point. This is a free site, some of us have chosen to support it. But in return for my 25 bucks I certainly do not expect anyone to sit down at their computer and supply me with an indepth analysis of anyhing that I have posted. That just is not going to happen here. I have no problem with that. The best that I can hope for is that one of my "cronies" pays me a visit and shares their opinions with me. I'm always grateful for that.

 

Matt, not to get down on your case but it has all been said before. You know that, I know that, eveyone knows that. You imply above that most posters find fault with the system. How do you know that? Do you have access to the stats? I don't think anyone really knows what most posters want on this site. I myself prefered the prior system, the system we had before the recent changes, but that is just my preference.

 

What I don't understand though is if ratings bother people, why don't they just ignore them? You have to make a deliberate choice to see the ratings; just don't choose to look at them. The system requires the ratings. How else can a machine select what to display? To reitterate, it has all been said before. Regards.

Your points are well taken, Matt.

I agree. And I also feel that anyone requesting a critique needs to supply a fair amount of information for the privilege. Something about what the photographer means to accomplish with the image. Something about the making of the image. The location. The person. Lighting. Exposure. Equipment. All of that. Or any one element. But something.<p>

 

Critiques are not done in a vacuum. I find the typical, "All comments welcome," or "How can I improve," or "Leave a comment," much less than that which is necessary for a meaningful return.<p>

 

VL

What a surprise, a condesending punk meaningless reply from Carl Root. Oops, please dont tell on me Carly.

I didn't find Carl's reply meningless at all. It is a perfectly valid question and, until it is answered, Matt will never get the answere to the alluded to question of, "How do I get people to critique my images." ....Jay

Carl's 'condenscending' comment is subtly making a very good point here, although nobody so far seem to have caught on with it.

 

The tough reality that many fellow members urgently need to come to terms with is that 99.99% of the world can't give a dime about critiquing their work. I have been a member here for a long time and provided numerous honest and to-the-point critiques. Yet, compared to the amount of photos I have viewed here, it seems that I only critique one in every few hundred photos that I happen to see. (including the thumbnails that I don't even bother to click) Considering the views versus number-of-comments ratio on all photos on this site, it seems that most members of the site are even less generous with spending time to write something about any given photo.

 

Is that a problem? No. It it to be expected? Yes. Let's face it: In order to get a couple of insightful critiques you need hundreds - if not thousands - of people to see your photos, to increase the odds that among these people there will be someone: (a) particularly interested in or moved by the photo (b) capable of writing something useful © willing to spend the time at the moment

 

Do an experiment yourself. There are tons of free webspace accounts on the web, and tons of free comment/guestbook software. Put one of your photos there with a box asking people to critique your work. Now wait. How soon do you think it will be until you get a few insightful critiques about your work? Not too soon I presume.

 

In order to get critiques you need some exposure. The only way photo.net can provide users with exposure for their photos is through a computer-assisted mechanism of filtering photos and ranking them. The photos submitted every day are orders of magnitude more than could fit on a few gallery thumbnail pages. Hence you have the TRP. The only way this can work at the moment is by a ratings mechanism. (or by a brigade of gallery moderators that would cost a lot to maintain and would be infinitely less objective)

 

It has been explained dozens of times before that the ratings are an essential meachanism for the site's funtion. Without it the photo.net server cannot decide on how to allocate visible spots to photos in any meaningful way.

 

If you spend some time on the 'rate recent uploads' interface like I do, you will quickly realize that a random or semi-random display is absolutely not appropriate for the gallery given the volume and everage quality of uploads.

 

So just get over it. This site is providing you with exposure that you couldn't possibly have earned yourself. Thousands of people will see your photos and some of them might even write something about it. To do that, it needs to have a ranking system. Either respect it and live with it, or build your own site and try to get the exposure yourself on your own terms.

 

There are dozens of people lately asking for an option to mark their photos as 'critique-only'. I wonder how many of them will actually do this when the feature is offered. I wonder how many of them would opt out of the mechanism that provides the visibility in this site. Actually it IS offered already. Just upload a photo and don't put it in the critique queue. Nobody will notice, nobody will rate, nobody will comment.

The question "Why do you comment/critique" was asked [by my own humble person :o) ] once, as an answer to Jay B's question, "why do you post images".

 

Alas, my question was somewhat ignored:(

 

Remember, anything you do on this site as a user, it's for your own pleasure (even if you don't pay for it). This holds for those who give you 2/2 ratings without a word left behind, and for those who write 2 pages of intelligent critique on my shitty snapshot. It's because they enjoy doing so. I am thankful to all of them, it makes me feel good that I can be part of their pleasure.

 

Actually, if I feel somebody gave me a way too low rate without comment and without a good reason, I go to them and give them a waay too HIGH rating on an average photo of them, with a comment. So that they feel bad about it:) I do it because I also enjoy doing so. They should be thankful to me for making them part of my pleasure:)

Matt, Jay, Steve and Venicia, You should copy and paste the comment from Nikos and read it every time you are tempted to complain about the rating and comment situation here on PN. Nikos, in those few paragraphs, has said it all in a polite and succinct way.

Nikos has conveyed exactly how the Gallery ticks. There are literally thousands of portfolio sites on the Web. You can get a web hosting account for a few dollars per month, and if you don't mind ads and don't need all the features, you can get one for free. A domain name costs you another few bucks. There are any number of free open source packages written in perl, PHP, etc to do comments and guest books, or even full forums. If you want, Ars Digita Community System (ACS), which is the basis for the photo.net software is open source and is available all over the web, although I wouldn't recommend it in 2004.

 

Putting up a web site is easy. There are plenty of build-a-web-site packages out there. There are even several build-a-PORTFOLIO-web-site packages out there.

 

But how are you going to get visitors? You can run around the web trying to put links to your new web site all over the place. You can try to get your website into search engines. But there are 40,000 other people with portfolio web-sites, all doing that. To get one visitor who is qualified and willing to comment, you need thousands of visitors. Where are they going to come from? It is doable, of course. A very reasonable strategy for getting traffic for a portfolio web site is to put your portfolio also on a site like photo.net that lets you post photos and have a link to your portfolio site. (Although that does kind of beg the question as to what is the use of the independent web site.) But the bottom line, it is a lot of work to attract visitors for your independent portfolio web site.

 

A steady flow of visitors is the value of photo.net, not the fact that we give people some disk space and some servers and bandwidth to serve up their photos. It is a site where about 100,000 people per day already come to look at photos. A small percentage of those will write comments, and a percentage of those comments are useful to the photograpers.

 

But photo.net has a problem. We have between 500 and 700 photos per day being submitted for critique. And only about 60 to 100 of those can be prominently featured on the site, in the places where visitors come to see new photos -- on the first few TRP pages, in the "Rate Recent" queue, and other prominent pages. It is true that all the photos can be found, and we try to provide a lot of different paths through the Gallery for people to find photos, but the fact is that only a few photos can be put in front of the noses of the visitors. Some people, having already gained visibility on the site, are less dependent on having their new photos prominently displayed in order to get viewers, but this is not the case for most members. How do we decide which 60 to 100 photos those are going to be?

 

That is where the rating system enters in. Among the 100,000 people who visit photo.net daily, there is a floating group of about 2000 to 3000 people who rate photos for us, some of them every day. This group turns over fairly fast, but it stays about the same relative size, growing at about the same rate as the Gallery itself. Most of these people are photographers who have uploaded photos themselves, and some of them are rating photos in order to get ratings for their own photos, knowing that being a "rater" increases their personal visibility on the site, and that this translates to views, ratings, and comments. But rating is also an oddly enjoyable and educational experience, and many people find it interesting and fun to do for short lengths of time (provided they don't get spammed by photographers reacting to ratings considered "too low" ) With the help of those people and their ratings, photo.net can decide which photos are going to get those 60 slots that are available daily to show photos prominently.

 

We are going to provide a critique-only option, mainly because people keep demanding it. But the truth is, I think once people try it, one way or the other it is going to be a back-water, that it will reach an equilibrium at about 20 to 30 photos per day, most likely a small group of people submitting and commenting upon each others' photos, like the old Critique Circles, or perhaps like some of the forums where there are groups of people regularly participating in No Words threads.

 

 

 

Brian, I found your post very interesting. I've often wondered how many people have their own portfolio websites. Just wondering where you got the figure of 40,000, it does seem rather low, it wouldn't have surprised me to see an extra nought or two on the end of that figure.

This has been discussed many times. I know that changes are comging (*perhaps* within a month or so) which will allow people to rate ONLY in the critique forum. Or something of the sort.

 

I have never submited work for critiques but, after reading all the complaints I did a "test", if you will, by submitting some pictures.

 

I got very, very few critiques (I think the ratio of critique to rating is over 10 to 1...and that's after *requesting* a critique) and you can't see individual ratings, only the avg. So, if someone gives a 2 and anther a 6 you'll only see a 4 so you have no idea of what the high and low ratings are.

 

To me, if anything, it would be interesting to see how different people react to the images. The avg is only a tool for the site.

 

Then, there have been people complaining of photographers having their friends, cousins, dogs & cats rate their pictures to score a HIGH avg (I think this is known as the buddy rating system???).

 

Then, there were those who complained about retaliatory SUPER LOW ratings by users who were pissed off at them (for whatever reason...I must admit, I have found some pretty touchy people here, it seem they come here to vent their anger...).

 

So, there's always an issue about this :) Even a no-rating solution will NOT insure or guarantee a proper critique or any critique at all.

Giampero, you can certainly see both the distribution of the ratings and the average. You can see the number of people who gave the photo a 6/6 and the number of people who gave it a 4/4, or any other combination of Aesthetics and Originality. You can also see a list of the names of the people who rated the photo. What you cannot see is WHO exactly gave you which rating.

 

When people say they want to see who gave which rating, generally they mean one of the following:

 

1. They want to "check out" the portfolio of the person who gave the extreme high or low ratings to decide if the rating should be taken seriously. MY TAKE: This is not a valid reason. No single rating should be taken very seriously. And if you must take a single rating seriously, it shouldn't be on the basis of whether a person has a portfolio and whether the portfolio is good.

 

2. They want to be able to ask the low raters why their ratings were low. They don't say so, but perhaps they hope to get the person to change the rating. MY TAKE: The site doesn't want photographers spamming and challenging people who rate "low", no matter how polite they imagine they are being. This will only discourage people from rating photos, which is a service to the site which we want them to continue finding interesting and enjoyable. If people want to explain their ratings, they will write a comment.

 

3. They want to rate the person's photographs applying the same apparent standards that the person applied to them. (i.e. they want to retaliate for an "undeserved" low rating; or to thank a person for a "generous" high rating). Alternatively, they want to leave comments on the rater's photos, rebuking him for a low rating, or thanking him for a high rating. MY TAKE: This is abuse, and it is better that you not do it because if you did and we discovered it, you would be banned.

 

4. They recognize the names of particular raters and through a study of their past ratings and comments, they feel they know the tastes and standards applied by those particular people. Thus, they feel they can assign more than a statistical meaning to a particular rating from a particular person, even if the person doesn't comment on a photo. MY TAKE: This is a valid argument, and I'm sorry this ability has been lost. But it isn't clear to me how significant this is, and I tend to feel that this argument is a bit over-stated. Any one person's ratings tend to be highly correllated with the averages on the photos he or she has rated. When they aren't, it may be because that person has other than mainstream tastes, but more likely it is because someone is letting other things besides his tastes and the merit of the photos influence his ratings. In other words, the average of the anonymous raters most of the time is more reliable than the ratings of any individual rater. I would make an exception for photos that are "avante garde", where someone in sympathy with the photographer's somewhat unusual aims might be a better source of input than ratings averages. photo.net isn't a very friendly place for avante garde photos and it is true to say that our recent changes haven't made it any friendlier. But most photos, by definition, are not avante garde.

Tim Holte, I'm sorry Tim but where did you find me complaining Sir?

....Jay

My cryptic response served several purposes.

 

The first is that it serves as an example of what I'll call a hit and run comment that is very common in the gallery and causes a lot of people to get bent out of shape, as we all saw in this thread. Maybe it would probably be better to turn off the comment option in the RFC queue and ask people to comment off the TRP list or favorite lists. That way, people would understand the different functions of each viewing area on the site.

 

Brian commented in another question that ideally we're all uploading very good images or at least ones that are good enough to justify a discussion. Someone else noted that some images can't really be improved. They're just successful snapshots and the shooter needs to be exposed to a lot more good work which will provide an influence before s/he is ready to even think about another approach. Sometimes the best way to learn is to just lurk.

 

But let's say you've got an upload that is OK and I can see some specific ways that I think it could be improved, ie how I would have shot it differently. How do I know you would be receptive to my ideas? The obvious answer is that you would have already made it very clear that you like certain things about my images and want to figure out a way to incorporate them in your work. Failing that, my experience has been that all too often, suggestions and a 4/4 are met by:

 

1) suggestions and a 4/4

2) "who-are-you-to-criticize"

3) "I like it the way it is."

4) "leave my friend's picture alone" . . . . . . or most often . . 5) nothing. No thanks . . . . nothing.

 

So why bother?

Jay, you don't have to call me sir, the highest I made it in the Marines was Lance corporal and I barely made that. When have I seen you complain? In about fifty different posts here in the last few months (seems like years). I hope this new system will make you and your "fellow travellers" happy so you can concentrate on taking and uploading photos. I thought the old system was good and it looks like this new system will be even better. All of the whining about ratings was really getting to me and I was thrilled to see Nikos's post and then Brian's after it. To all good luck and blast away!

What does "fellow travellers" mean? And I don't believe I have ever complained about the ratings. Although I have voiced my opinion that I liked knowing who rated what. I guess that makes me a "fellow traveler" whatever that is....;)....J

Um, Tim . . . we're not talking about ratings. This is about critiques.

Jay, he thinks you're a Communist.

>>Giampero, you can certainly see both the distribution of the ratings and the average. You can see the number of people who gave the photo a 6/6 and the number of people who gave it a 4/4, or any other combination of Aesthetics and Originality.<<

 

How do you do that? I couldn't see/find such an option.

Sorry, I was ambigous with above question: I know one can see the TOTAL ratings but I was thinking *for each picture*, not the total.

 

For example: I have received some 2s or 7s I would want to see which pictures received those ratings. I don't care to know who gave them.