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Amazon ratings of Ghosts of Saltmarsh
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7608985" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I'm involved in another community where books are regularly rated, and 'normal curve' does not normally happen. </p><p></p><p>Most reviewers have one of two curves:</p><p></p><p>A) Bimodal Distribution: Everything is either good or bad, and good things tend to receive the highest rating and bad things the lowest. Average ratings tend to be rare, as cases where a person has mixed feelings about something unusual. Basically these people are rating their feelings. If they like it, praise it, and if they didn't, then hate it.</p><p>b) The Bad Long Tail: Almost everything that they read is a 5 star book, and each worse rating is rarer than the one before. These people like reading, and reading itself gives them pleasure, and they will read almost anything and certainly almost anything in the genres that they prefer. It's rare that they encounter a book that makes them uncomfortable or has any flaw that meaningfully impacts their enjoyment. They just like to read.</p><p></p><p>The reading habits of the public then create all sorts of counter-intuitive weirdness, such as, "The worse a series gets, the higher the average rating of subsequent books in the series." The reason for behavior like this is that most readers are turned off by the decline in quality in the series and so stop reading, leaving the series to be rated only by its most devoted fans. The number of reviews on later books in the series tends to decline sharply, and the most popular review tends to be negative, but the average review tends to be more and more positive.</p><p></p><p>Another counter-intuitive result of aggregate human behavior is that anything with an average rating much below 4 stars ("it was really good") probably sucks, because the average reader is so reluctant to give ratings lower than 5 stars, that anything much below 4 indicates most readers hated it. Yet at the same time, it's almost impossible to have an average rating much above 4 stars, since it's almost impossible to find a book most people liked and those that didn't like it tend to give it 1 star. So the actual range tends to be between 3.8 and 4.3, and that 'half star' worth of rating is almost the full difference between a classic and trash.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7608985, member: 4937"] I'm involved in another community where books are regularly rated, and 'normal curve' does not normally happen. Most reviewers have one of two curves: A) Bimodal Distribution: Everything is either good or bad, and good things tend to receive the highest rating and bad things the lowest. Average ratings tend to be rare, as cases where a person has mixed feelings about something unusual. Basically these people are rating their feelings. If they like it, praise it, and if they didn't, then hate it. b) The Bad Long Tail: Almost everything that they read is a 5 star book, and each worse rating is rarer than the one before. These people like reading, and reading itself gives them pleasure, and they will read almost anything and certainly almost anything in the genres that they prefer. It's rare that they encounter a book that makes them uncomfortable or has any flaw that meaningfully impacts their enjoyment. They just like to read. The reading habits of the public then create all sorts of counter-intuitive weirdness, such as, "The worse a series gets, the higher the average rating of subsequent books in the series." The reason for behavior like this is that most readers are turned off by the decline in quality in the series and so stop reading, leaving the series to be rated only by its most devoted fans. The number of reviews on later books in the series tends to decline sharply, and the most popular review tends to be negative, but the average review tends to be more and more positive. Another counter-intuitive result of aggregate human behavior is that anything with an average rating much below 4 stars ("it was really good") probably sucks, because the average reader is so reluctant to give ratings lower than 5 stars, that anything much below 4 indicates most readers hated it. Yet at the same time, it's almost impossible to have an average rating much above 4 stars, since it's almost impossible to find a book most people liked and those that didn't like it tend to give it 1 star. So the actual range tends to be between 3.8 and 4.3, and that 'half star' worth of rating is almost the full difference between a classic and trash. [/QUOTE]
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