3-or Below..

[._._z]

So... it's meaningless to you. So what?

[root]

"Funny, I don't hear anyone complaining about 'hit and run' high ratings that don't explain why someone thought an image was good."

 

I did.

[mottershead]

June, a single isolated rating *is* close to meaningless. A single rating is probably better indicator of how the public will regard a photo than no ratings. But that isn't saying much. Given how much tastes vary, a single rating is only very marginally better than no ratings at all.

 

That said, you can learn something from the average and distribution of the ratings, provided there are enough of them. Each additional rating gives you a better estimate of how well your photo conforms to popular tastes, or at least photo.net tastes. One rating is an isolated opinion, possibly from a nut. Two ratings that are the same is starting to be a consensus. The average of ten ratings isn't definitive (a different ten could well produce another result), but it is a lot better than nothing.

 

All this is why the site uses average ratings and counts of ratings to decide which photos to feature as "Top Photos". If you don't care about what popular taste thinks of your photo, then there is no reason to care about photo.net ratings at all.

[peggy_jones]

<i>"How can the photographer improve if they don't know WHAT to improve??? And if the rater can't be bothered to explain, then who needs their rating, it's just a hit-and-run."</i>

 

<p>many times a low rating indicates NO ROOM TO IMPROVE (i.e., "the photo is <i>perfectly</i> trite, or pretentious, or self-serving, or overdone, or pandering to current tastes, or whatever... IMO"), but rather a <i>dislike</i> of the photo or of the maker's presentation of it. unfortunately, leaving that type of critique, even tactfully, usually gets the commenter into an imbroglio, so understandably after a few "rows", comment of this type is best avoided.

[matthew_s._schwartz]

I agree completely. I call it like I see it (tactfully), and that makes a lot of people angry. I have been the subject of retaliation, and at some point I think honest critiques will lose out in favor of simple low rankings.

 

The problem there is that even with the anonymous ranking system, some folks sit around watching for low rankings figuring out who left it... and that has earned me additional retaliatory commments / rankings.

 

Honesty is the best policy -- usually. Sometimes it's best just to keep one's mouth shut.