I think it doesn't make any difference. If you really want to give your .5 rating, you'll do that with one click more.
So going by that, we have 2 kinds of 1 star ratings on here. People who think you should get a 1 star after they read it and what so many call here "trolls". The first one wouldn't feel anything and for the second group it is one or two clicks more to do exactly the same. So if we talk troll: Do you really think that a person who is petty enough to give the entire frontpage 1 star ratings will stop because he has to do one click more?
And yeah, you can do something against pushing your own story views and the like, but this also brings us into the discussion of "when is a rating valid?". After one chapter? After one paragraph?
If someone reads a story where the MC rapes a girl in the first story and thinks that deserves a 1star rating, why would he have to read X more chapters so that his rating is valid? If someone publishes a 10k word chapter, is the reader forced to "read" 40k words of shit, because we decided that "4 chapters" sounds like a good cut-off? What do you do with one-shot stories? So do we use "1 chapter valid read" as cut-off? Then that's one click more to throw a 1 star rating around...
The big problem is this: pageviews are objective. Ratings aren't. Some user might want to rate a 1 star to a story that gets mostly 5 stars. So that isn't something an automatic check can decide. So how do you decide what is a good check for a subjective feeling?
The problem isn't whether someone wants to do something or not. The problem is that people have a fundamental problem with 1 star ratings and the ratings system. And that won't change because you add one more step to add such rating. RoyalRoad still has drive-by .5 stars, massive bad ratings for popular stories, and the same toxicity that a small subset of their users bring into the game. It didn't go away. And the same would happen with your proposal...
It's like those "Are you over 18?" dialogues on certain websites. Those doesn't change the fact that underage people visit them. At best, they learn how to distract 18 from the current year...
In all honesty: If you can find a working automatic check that makes sense, take my upvote and blessing. But I personally can't see any improvement following this specific proposal...
This is so interesting! ^^
I think for me (I mean, coming from the
other thread), my actual opinion is that a majority of 1-star ratings that most people receive are "genuine" (which I personally define as a unique rating coming from someone who at least read a little bit of the story). There's a tendency for authors to automatically think that it must be a "troll rating" coming from malicious readers... but to some extent I kind of doubt how common "troll ratings" really are.
There's not really a good way to measure how prevalent this is either.
I think authors tend to care more about their own ratings then readers do. Like in the other thread, we were talking about hypothetical readers going through the effort to make clone accounts to dump multiple negative reviews on the same story but... seriously...? Are there really that many readers who are going to dedicate that much effort to express their negative feelings about a story?
Personally, I think some authors probably get really paranoid and presume that readers hate them more than they really do...
I think most readers don't really care that much... they leave 1-star and move on...
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Personally I think a rating is valid even if a reader only reads the first paragraph.
But to me, a rating isn't a rating if they didn't even look at the story...
Hence to me, it makes perfect rational sense to have the "you clicked on the first chapter" => your rating counts.
If it doesn't take that much effort to implement that check programatically, I personally don't see any harm in having that kind of check. Even if it's just to annoy trolls, I don't really mind. It's sort of like how some websites have one-account-per-email policies. Every web developer knows that it's extremely trivial and easy for people to go and make additional emails if they wanted to, but it's enough of a hassle that it does somewhat disincentivize multiple account usage.
I don't think the goal is to eradicate malicious behavior.
It's extremely easy to implement certain boolean programatic checks, and 30 minutes of a programmer's effort cumulatively adds up to a lot of time that trolls need to waste later on.
Furthermore, Tony already does a lot of manual review-removing on ScribbleHub.
I'd be surprised if he didn't already start looking for ways to automate it... since a lot of people request him to remove certain ratings. For all we might know, maybe he already has some kind of algorithm that is detecting potentially spam-ratings.
