PETITION: Go back to a comments before ratings system

Allright guys. This is a great site, it's got plenty of useful

information, I simply love it. Problem is, the rating system is BAD.

It really is. Simply based randomly on the time on the day you post

a picture, you can get an almost instant 3/7 for and otherwise

respectable picture, and get no comments at all. I think that to

rate a picture 2/7 or 3/7 you should at LEAST make a comment on why

it is SO bad 0_0

 

This has been bugging me for a while, but this got me steaming.

 

Stats Viewed 0 times with 7 ratings

Aesthetics 3.00/7 Originality 3.00/7

 

Viewed 0 times? Does that mean people didn't even see my picture and

rated it? That's simply scandalous, I can't take it. I'm starting to

favor even a comments only system like the one on deviantart. You

don't have anything to say? Then simply pass on...

 

This probably has been discussed over and over, but I really needed

to get some steam off... You know, I don,t mind the site being slow,

having an outdated interface (it's sad but true, but I don't mind)

and having a few bugs here and there, but this one is what breaks

it. Don't know how many people are thinking like me here, we'll see.

 

So to anyone in favor of being force to comment to be able to leave

a rating, post here!

The views are updated on probably a daily basis. So what appears to be 0 views is misleading.

One has to 'wait' 24 hours and then check to see how may 'views' were recorded. Computers are real time and some real time has to pass for the computer to catch up.

It's very quirky, but apparently we take the rough with the smooth. The rating system benefits the site, even though it may occasionally appear to abuse photographers. We want the site, we ignore the abuse.

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Change the rating system, yes.

I think the numbered system is fine save one key thing: the words, Very

Bad, Bad, Below Average, Average, Good, Very Good and Excellent. I

think that the words associated with the ratings deter some from giving

honest ratings, or others from seeing the ratings they got as some sort of

personal insult.

 

If the words, Low and High were the only ones on the scale, I think

people wouldn't take it so seriously. A 3 is a 3/7, it shouldn't bear

association with being "Below Average." Sometimes a 1 or 2/7 is

merrited. But I could never bear to say that someone's work is, "Very

Bad." The connotations are terrible.

 

I think people should comment however. But at the same time this

might gain a lot of, "Good." comments and not neccessarily consructive/

instructive ones.

 

On another note. I hear lot of comments on how people with bad

photos or none at all always give bad ratings. While it's probably not an

always sort of situation. I do find some merrit in the statements. I don't

think people who don't play the game themselves should get on the

field.

Ratings are opinions, take them or leave them. Every one of us have to deal with that on a daily basis. And no, they don't say *everything* about the shot, it can be decent enough, and get low ratings anyway. Don't take it to the heart, but just as a way to messure the popularity or massive acceptance of shot. Look at the average, not each rate if you don't want to get mad about it...

 

As somebody said above, they're usefull to the site, cause they allow a way to classify images. You wouldn't have the Top Rated Photos page at all if you hadn't ratings.

 

Anyway, I read somewhere else (not sure about this) that an option of "no rate" for each posting, will be included in the future, that would be fine for many people.

 

When this 1 to 7 rating scale was introduced, it was necessary to write a comment to be able to rate with extreme scores, then people use to left comments like "ouch", "wow", "gee" or even "·$%" or ":-)". Naturally, the option was deleted.

 

We cannot have a rating system to satisfy everyone. Then we cannot have a rating system to satisfy you, without leaving unsatisfied somebody else...

 

Just relax, take it easy, keep posting and have fun!!

 

Regards.

One more suggestion: if you *really* want to hear somebody´s else opinion, write to the person, maybe you will learn somthing new. But do NOT contact the person if you are not to hear somebody's reason of not liking your image.

 

After all, not every posted image MUST reasonate on everyone else' soul, isn'it? If that were warranted, what a boring world we would be having!! :-)))

 

Last but not least: have you ever wondered why everybody feel hurted with "unfair" low ratings but not with "unnfair" too high ratings? ;-)

Jean-Philippe, I am curious - how often do you leave comments when you rate photos? 50% of the time? 25% of the time? I suspect we are all somewhat guilty, included yourself, of what you are so upset about.

More generally, I find that a reaction to a photo is often a visceral reaction, and for a low rated photo, the visceral reaction is simply "it doesn't do anything for me; I don't like it". That is not a constructive or helpful statement, so most people don't leave it. It requires more effort to describe why you don't like something, and it often has to do with subject choice, lighting, technical quality as well as aesthetic quality, etc.

For what I see in his workspace, we cannot say that he's "guilty": wiht 32 ratings to others, he has commented 151 times (by the time I'm writting this). That's a lot, and much more than the average. We an say that Jean-Philippe is a good pnetter. :-)

 

Anyway, maybe he's going tthrough the usual process for every new photonetter (he´s been here for a few months): a lot of expectations over the rating system at the beginning, then the natural reaction is to blame it and try to change it. Hopefully he'll go to the next step soon, reducing his expectations to a lower and more realistic level. In other words: resignation.

"Forced" comments will not solve anything. Just result in meaningless one-liners or even jibberish just to fool the system. Key is to drop the numbered ratings altogether. It's the bane of the site and has been from the first day it was implemented.

Nestor, I stand corrected; JP has been diligent in adding comments to his ratings - I had not checked, and should have.

I keep saying it, but people are either not listening or don't understand: the ratings are for the site and the comments are for the photographers.

 

If you think you can get some meaning from the ratings, fine, but they are not intended as a communications medium between the raters and the photograpers. They are intended solely as as a means of ranking the photographs for site purposes, one of the main ones being Top Photos. The only reason we identify the raters is so that photo.net members can help us identify abuse, and so that raters feel some responsibility for their ratings. This has some down sides, such as mate-rating and retaliatory ratings, but on the whole it works better than the anonymous system that we had prior to August 2001.

 

Time spent by a photographer trying to understand a single high or low rating is wasted. Emotion expended because of an isolated high or low rating is human. But it is stupid, like many things that are human. If you want, be delighted/disappointed that your photo is/is not in the Top Photos, but don't pay attention to individual ratings.

Brian, I can understand what you mean about the ratings being for the site and the comments being for the photographer, but why is a photo dumped to the "abysses of pnet" after 10 ratings? It should be based on the number of comments at the place of the ratings then no?

 

Oh and the 32 ratings I gave were when I first arrived here :) I soon understood that ratings we're utterly useless, and I only comment now =P

You can select rank by number of comments in the top photos list. That's what I always do anyway and I get a far more interesting list of photos.

Photos aren't dropped to the "abyss" after ten ratings. Once they have ten ratings, they presumably have a somewhat meaningful average based on the opinions of 10 people, and the photo will be obscure if its average rating is low, and it will get a lot of visibility if the average rating is high. That is the whole point of the rating system.

 

As I said above, it is not primarily a system for raters to communicate with photographers -- some kind of system to save typing. That is the purpose of the comments. If people want to explain their rating to the photographer, that is fine, since the photographers always seem curious about the reasons for low ratings, but ratings that are not explained are still useful to the site provided there are enough of them. It isn't our goal to discourage rating by making people feel obliged to explain them to the photographers. We also know for experience that requiring such explanations just produces a lot of one-word comments that are even more frustrating to photographers than no comment at all.

 

The ratings are there to provide a ranking system that decides whether a photo will fade into obsurity, or not. With nearly a million photos on the site, some are going to be visible and some are going to be obscure. The major aim of the rating system is to help ensure that good photos, or at least popular photos, are visible and that weaker photos, or photos of interest to a narrow range of people, become obscure. That may seem harsh, but that is the point of the system. When people are rating photos, they are helping the site decide which photos will be visible and which ones will be more or less invisible.

 

If you are rating photos and you have not realized that you are acting as a curator of the Gallery and that your rating is helping to determine the visibility of the photo, then it would be good if you did realize it. A low rating (or a non-rating) is a vote for the obscurity of the photo, and high rating is a vote for the photo to be put in front a lot of people.

 

Each photo submitted for critique is put into the "Rate Recent Photos" list, which is ordered by number of ratings, in the following order: 10, 9 ..., 1, 0, 15, 14, ..., 11, max, max-1, max-2, .... 21, 20. After it has 10 ratings, we assume that its average rating is somewhat significant, and rather than letting the photos near the head of the queue continue to receive ratings indefinitely, we let other photos have a turn. What happens is that a photo starts with zero ratings and is in the middle somewhere. It works its way up to the front of the list as people rate it. If it is subscriber photo, this process will start earlier. When it gets its tenth rating it drops back down to a second group, behind the photos with no ratings. If it eventually gets 20 ratings then it drops all the way to the end of the list, from where it can work its way up a bit should it get even more ratings.

 

This way, most photos submitted for critique will get at least 10 ratings. After that, they will be in Top Photos based on their average rating if that is high enough and will get more ratings that way. If we didn't follow this practice, then the photos with the most ratings would stay at the front of the "Rate Recent" list and get ever more ratings, never being dislodged until their 3 days were up. It would be basically a winner-take-all situation, where the most popular photos would get dozens or hundreds of ratings and most photos would get none at all.

 

I am describing the "Rate Recent Photos" list. Photos submitted for critique are still accessible for critique through the Critique Requests forum, and many other ways.

<em>I keep saying it, but people are either not listening or don't understand: the ratings are for the site and the comments are for the photographers</em>

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I think the problem is that they never will. I've been reading an excellent book on website design and usability analysis called "Don't make me Think" which make the very valid point that 95% of all web users don't want to think, and if you make them think, they will leave - or if they have a choice to make there's a good chance they'll make the wrong choice. They will grab onto the simplest explanation of anything (even if it's wrong) or click on the most obvious button (even it it doesn't do what they expect it to). People surf more by reflex and instinct than by thought.

<p>

The obvious explanation of ratings to that 95% of users is that they are feedback on image quality and that they are an important measure of their images. Since images are presented on all the "Top" pages ranked by rating, their viewpoint is that ratings are what matter. Even if this is wrong, they will still think it (or rather they will not think anything else). The idea that ratings are for the site and not for them is something they will not be able to grasp, even when explained to them, because it's non-obvious and it depends on which side of the fence you are sitting. You can tell them that ratings aren't important/meaningful, but they won't believe you, and to them they are important/meaningful - ergo they are important/meaningful.

<p>

I'm not sure there's a solution, but there's no surprise that this is a problem, given human nature and the way we do and see things.

<p>

You could have a comments only system for subscribers of course, but I think that such a system - when it didn't lead to images appearing on the "top" pages - would have limited appeal to many. It would make no real economic sense to provide a "comments only" option to non-subscribers.

<p>

Forcing a comment before rating would lead to two things. First a set of even more vapid and meaningless comments than we already have ("good", "geat", "wow", "magnificant"..). Second, fewer ratings. I'm not sure either of these is particularly desirable.

Personally (that's my own opinion) I'd prefer having a single more comment on my pictures and no ratings at all, than the opposite.

 

You're bringing in the point that the ratings are to show which photos should be in the top photos, and which ones shouldn't. Then why not change the ratings descriptions to something like

 

1- Of no interest to the community

2- Of minimum interest to the community

3- Of little interest to the community

4- Of average...

5- Of good...

6- Of great...

7- Should be seen by everybody

 

I think that would clear up things, and I'm sure people won't have a so visceral reaction while hearing their picture is of "little interest" than "below average"

 

I think the reason for this, is that people (including me) interpret "average picture" as a picture any snapshooter would take, for example a girl in a cluttered room, centered in the frame, washed out of the flash and with red eyes. (Ok I'm a bit exagerating here, but the average photographer centeres his subjects, and pops his flash at the first occasion)

 

So by changing "Below average picture" to "Little interest to the community", we specify that the picture, for the pictures that VISIT here, are of little interest, but that doesn't mean that it is below a picture the average snapshooter will do.

 

I don't know if people understand what I mean... It may be something very meaningless to some, but I think it'd help a bit.

 

If people have other ideas, be sure to share them :)

 

(BTW, I haven't changed my mind about prefering a no ratings system, but I simply see that it won't be possible to remove them, so I'm gtiving other options... I don,t understand why sites such as deviantart can work just as well with a comments only system, but that pnet can't, but oh well, I'm not an administrator, not a hero, and not even a paying member, so my opinion probably isn't making lots of waves in the "upper classes" ;) )

Please read what Jean-Philippe just said.

 

The comment about users (I would emphasize NEW users) giving little thought to how to interact with the site should make it clear just how useless the ratings really are. You can't have it both ways. You are both willing to spend considerable time trying to restate your same point over and over again, yet when someone comes up with a way to improve the situation, it gets ignored.

 

The current rating interface says nothing about the purpose of the rates and does not take into account the increasingly large number of novice users on this site. They are accidentally picking the images that get visibility for everyone including advanced and professional photographers. How can that possibily be the best way to select images for discussion? . . . that presumably being the reason for a photocritique forum.

�the ratings are for the site and the comments are for the photographers� A request

for critique is now an offer to help the site not a request for some comment

!

Brian and Bob do you truly believe this?

 

 

�Photos submitted for critique are still accessible for critique through the Critique

Requests forum, and many other ways.�

 

NONE of the critique by category selections work. Fact.

 

�A low rating (or a non-rating) is a vote for the obscurity of the photo.�

 

An image with an average 3/3 and 15 rates will be counted by the system as BETTER

than an image with an average 5/5 and 10 rates. FACT

 

 

 

When I request a critique it is to try to get comments � I agree and understand that

ratings are a filter but you never seem to grasp that when my image gets 10 rates etc

and �your site needs� are met mine are not.

 

The first 10 raters are �on average� not likely to include someone who comments. The

system drops the image down the list and I have much less chance of getting a

comment (remember I am not interested in rates � you told me I shouldn�t be and I

agree).

 

There is NO OTHER way to easily present your image for comments. (Except posting

to forums or emailing individuals.)

 

The point is the SITE IS RUN FOR THE SITE. Absurd. If it was run for the photographers

then the comments would be a major element of the site.

 

�the ratings are for the site and the comments are for the photographers� - Brian

Mottershead Feb�2004

 

Anyone else agree?

Bob, as you've just been reading, user-psychology <i>is</i> a vital ingredient in website design, and taking the "rough with the smooth" is what we must do while the design of the rating system remains as it is. The current design of the rating system, (RRP, buttons, etc) generates some considerable negativity among thoughtful and articulate users.

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Brian, I think the point that many are making is that the issue of changing the interface to reduce the negative aspects of the rating system is <i>still</i> worth thinking about, no matter how many times it's been raised before - even if the current design seemed like a 'breakthrough' when it was first introduced.

"Anyone else agree?"

 

No.

 

Giving the absurdly low amount of comments (sometimes equal to zero) compared to the amount of ratings, and giving the fact that mainly ratings, and not comments, sends photos to the Top Rated Photos page (except for one of the classifications), then ratings *are* -a way to- have some kind of feedback. Of course that kind of feedback is not a perfect or great one, but if I have no (meaningful) comments, and ratings "belong" to the site, then what would I be looking for here by posting my shots? I guess that only the chance to get some comment...? It seems to be like begging for a few words...!

 

No, Sir, rates ARE also a feedback for photographers. At least with the present interface design.

Rating ARE for the site. If you're going to have some way of selecting images for presentation you have to have some sort of numerical rating system. You can't sort images by comments. Ratings are for photographers too, since they provide a way to find the better images and give the photographer some rough feedback on how well the images are liked by the general site audience, but the "raison d'etre" for numerical ratings is the ability to use those numbers in ways to present images

 

Comments ARE for the photographers since there's no way the site can use them to select images for display. They may benefit the site by attracting users, but they are of no practical use to the site in structuring the content or designing ways to present images.

Personally I have no idea how a lot of the "top photos" get and stay there in the first place. While there are a lot of good photographs posted IMO maybe a third are average at best. And that is putting it nicely. Maybe just a touch above crap. To make matters worse people see what does well and produce work which is similiar. The same stuff over and over again. Personally I find the whole concept of top photos the way it is presented counter productive to the creative process. Maybe management feels it is necessary for some reason but IMO in no way shows off the best of the site. Again there are a lot of good photos just a <i> photonet pop culture mentality of the masses</i> has set in. Kind of what you can't get away from on the radio. Maybe we should rename it "top 40 photos" and look to hire a photo jockey.

hahaha...! That was good one. Yes, I agree. To certain point. And cause I agree with you, one of the filters for the Top Photos that I use more, is the one that arrange photos by its "Originality" ratings. I suggest you to try it, from time to time fine and good surprises come out.

I see I'm not the only one that isn't satisfied :)

 

Why not use a system that will, at the place of using ratings, will show "Most popular photos" at the place of "Top rated photos"? Most popular photos would be the ones with the most views/comments, and that would simply remove the need for a rating system altogether!

 

Good idea or not?