Get rid of overall ratings

 Ivy:

I've seen it consistently enough on airing dramas in the past year or so to be bothered enough by it to make this thread.

I'm not disagreeing - it's picked up steam lately, but I've given up beating my head against walls. Remember when 99% of YouTube comments started 'Absolutely no one: '  Ugh. Hopefully this too is a trend.

 moonchild:

That's the issue. Some people who take it personally if ratings drop or rise. Those who love it want the rating to be high, those who hate it want it low and in both parties there are people who take drastic measures to make the rating go up or down by creating multiple accounts to vote etc. 

The comments and manipulations of ratings are indeed annoying and I wish people wouldn't do it, but I think stopping them is nearly impossible. I would hate to see the rating gone just because some people mess with it because it's indeed an interesting first indicator. 

Trigger warning: Math

I think the number of people trying to manipulating ratings is too low for it to make a big difference, except at the beginning when few people have voted. Let's take the imaginary BL "Accidental Kiss: You Trip, I Catch You" with a rating of 8 and 1,000 votes. Viewer X, who is sure he'll lose his mind if he sees one more accidental kiss, gives it a '1'. so 1,000 votes averaging 8 is ,1000 x 8 = 8,000 + 1 / 1,001 = 8.

Let's say Viewer X threatens never to 'like' another social media post of 10 of his friends unless they register accounts on MDL and vote '1' = now we have 1,000 x 8 + 11 x 1 = 8,011 / 1,011 = 7.9, so 10 people can make a difference - but are that many people trying to tear down series? I would think it's more likely they want to bump it up.

So, Viewer Y can't believe people would only rate something as brilliant as a show about a guy who catches another guy and they stare at each other until they turn gay as an 8, so she rates it a 10 and blackmails 10 of her friends. 1,000 x 8 + 11 x 10  = 1,110 / 1,010 = 8.  To raise it to an 8.1 you'd need 26 people to rate it a 10 (which would make it 8.051 - so just one low vote will bump it back down).

When there's only 100 votes, an "8" series can be lowered to 7.9 by one person giving it a 1. But a popular show like Bad Buddy has 18,265 votes, so it would take a small army to budge it.

As for reviews, you have someone explaining why they gave it a certain rating, and you usually won't pay much attention to a review that says "This series sucks. Don't watch it" and not much else. Or if they use the word "toxic" I usually ignore it too.

 Ivy:

I don't know about anyone else but the constant obsession with how a show rates on this site is starting to drive me insane - every drama now in the comments it's "why is this only [x]| or "I can't believe this [x] when [other drama] is [y]". On top of that we (allegedly) have people trying to manipulate the ratings by rating it low or high depending on their goal. Ratings could stay for individual reviews and still give people and idea of the audience response to the drama without having an average rating of the drama as a whole. I feel that the usefulness of an overall rating is being overshadowed.

Quote is for reference: As Ivy said originally; wanting to curb that discussion about ratings, so comments can get back to the story. One of the triggers for rating posts is going into an airing drama, with a one rating given months before it aired. It automatically triggers a discussion of why the rating is so low. It isn't about the rating, because like it's been pointed out it will all settle over time, but as aired it tarnishes the discussion experience.

One of the solutions mentioned; making pre-airing ratings not possible before aired. The thread is about the general user experience in discussions, not ratings in general.

 Anusaya:

One of the solutions mentioned; making pre-airing ratings not possible before aired. The thread is about the general user experience in discussions, not ratings in general.

I get that, sorry for going off-topic a bit though the topics are related. It's just that I find it hard to stop users from behaving like this unless there's some moderator staff for comments who regularly check comment sections and remove such comments (which would be an insane amount of work and hardly manageable). As stupid as it might sound it's probably easier to ignore such comments. After all it's also a question of how one deals with this. Sure I can get myself worked up over things like this but I might just as well move on and don't care about how crazy some people are when it comes to ratings. I learned that the hard way as I continuously stumble over unmarked spoilers in comment sections. Is it annoying? Yes, like hell but I can't change it. I can only avoid comment sections until I completely watched a drama. 

Serious question here because I'm unsure of how it actually is. I thought I read somewhere that ratings are not possible for unaired dramas yet they occasionally happen. How can that be? Bug? I just tried myself and can't rate any drama that hasn't started airing yet. 

A similar suggestion has been brought up before (in a different thread) to not allow ratings on currently airing dramas which I support, because I've seen people rating a drama low just because they needed to wait longer for it to be released which triggered the question regarding low ratings of course. I'm not fond of the idea though to connect ratings to reviews. I'd prefer being able to rate a drama without having to write a review every time. Personally it feels like a waste of time sometimes to write a review on a drama I didn't enjoy at all. Sometimes I just want to get over it. Rating it, is a thing I do for personal use as it helps me later to see on one glance what my initial thought was after watching it. So ratings do fulfil a purpose after all to some and shouldn't be removed completely. 

 Ivy:

I'm not suggesting we get rid of individual ratings per se

Yes, but I meant not only individual ratings, but also the overall rating. I don't care about algorithm and such. Even if I don't focus on ratings, I would like them to stay. 

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but you can't ban scoring a series until after it finishes airing - that removes half the purpose of the scores.  There are many series that look iffy to me, and if I come here and it's rated a 7 after the first ep, then I probably won't watch it, but I would check the comments to see what everything thinks is wrong with it. (But if there are only ten votes, I wouldn't take the vote seriously.)  But if you don't allow voting until after a series ends, a lot of people won't vote, and every show will have an artificially high score because only people that like it will have stuck to the end. Just think about a series that you thought was absolute garbage and were surprised anyone at all liked it. Well, it's going to have a 9.5 score if only people that watched the whole thing vote, so someone looking for something good will wander in and watch it, and then never come here again.

There aren't always "pre-votes" so it's probably some sort of glitch. I would hope that someone would notice that something hasn't aired yet and not really pay attention to the score until it does, but something does need to be done about this - I don't think anyone will argue that there shouldn't be any scores prior to airing! 

The reviews don't provide an aggregate score, and people can vote a review useful or not. If the review says "I've only watched four eps" then I'd vote "not useful". I'm not as much concerned with this issue because you have to read a review for it to affect you, and you can discard ones that are written by people that haven't watched the show. 

I don't think there are that many people that try to manipulate the vote, and it's almost always giving it 10s to bump it up if they think it's better than everyone else does - I've seen people openly do that. I've even jokingly said 'OK, great idea. I'll lower my vote to compensate."  (I don't do that.)

Just because I hate one thing in a series doesn't mean I hate the whole series and don't watch it, but it can diminish my overall enjoyment, or reduce it from something I find amazing to something watchable or a guilty pleasure. Like almost everyone hates the evil ex-gf trope, but you're not likely to stop watching if it appears, or you'll have nothing left to watch.

 Popcxqueen:

I've been noticing that people can rate episodes before they've aired, and that's definitely a problem, as it can skew the overall ratings, (if I understand how MDL ratings work, which admittedly I might not since they seem to be overly confusing.)

For instance, if you look at the Episode Guide for KinnPorsche, episodes 11-14 haven't aired yet, but they've already been rated 10.0 by multiple users, and that gets added into the ratings submitted after the episode actually airs.
https://mydramalist.com/69667-kinnporsche/episodes

Just as rating an unaired drama shouldn't be allowed, rating episodes before they air shouldn't be allowed either.  Maybe you can't stop folks from rating a drama after they've seen one or two episodes, but this seems different and more of a issue than that. 

That's a problem.  There are sometimes a couple of votes for a series overall before it airs, but not always and usually only a couple, and I can't vote on them. But I just went to KinnPorsche via your link and I can vote on future episodes. The future eps all seem to have 13 votes, all 10s, and that's likely to be enough to have a measurable effect on the eventual rating as only a few hundred people vote on individual eps, and this is a highly-watched series.  I'm a bit (a lot) older than the average memeber so it's completely mysitfying to me how anyone could be so invested in a bit of light entertainment that they feel they need to be political about voting. But then I couldn't give a flying f@#$ if anyone likes anything of mine on social media so I may be out of touch with the times.

I'm interviewing at TikTok and everyone I mention it to seems to think I'm running for emperor of the universe or something, while I'm not even sure I want the job. 

 Popcxqueen:

Maybe you can't stop folks from rating a drama after they've seen one or two episodes, but this seems different and more of a issue than that.

As far as I know MDL allows only scores from users who have watched at least 1/5 of the show, I mean you can rate it at any stage you want but it's not calculated into an overall rating when it's not 1/5. So if the drama has 24 episodes, rating it after watching 2 episodes will have no effect.

But it's really no difference whether it's 2 episodes, 1/5 or half of the show. If people really want to skew the overall rating (for example by giving it "1"), in my opinion they should be among those who "completed" the drama. Because "completing" is very easy and there is no verification. You just wait until the full show has aired and you can "complete" by clicking. Those who dropped the drama after 2, 5, or 10 episodes and rated it low are really harmless here, they just express they disliking, and they are quite honest too because anyone can see where they stopped watching the drama. (And if one day the rule is to be changed, it may happen that these 10 episodes they've watched won't be enough anymore)

As for the main topic: no votes from me.