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Overall Story Rating
Nick, I just realized something that I think has probably always bothered me. I've always felt that a story's rating is entirely irrelevant, because it's based on the ratings of the individual chapters. If there's a chapter that carries along the story's plot line well but isn't particularly amazing by itself, it's not likely to get super great ratings. But the story as a whole could still be spectacular, and may not deserve to get knocked down a point just because of one chapter.
I tend to judge a chapter against the rest of the chapters in the story anyway. I think that's how a chapter should be rated. There are some light-hearted and ridiculous stories where a silly chapter fits in perfectly and deserves a 5, but that doesn't mean that the story itself is better than another story whose criteria are intrinsically more strict.
A good example is the story where we write about why we write on Protagonize. Being nonfiction, there's not much criteria on which to base a rating other than the actual reason itself. Pretty much any reason for writing is a good one, so there's no way I could rate any of those chapters poorly. Yet I can think of many stories on the site which I would rate higher than that one if I had that option.
My suggestion is to let us rate the story as a whole, and of course we'll keep updating our rating as the story progresses. This would do a much better job reflecting the quality of the story. I think that the overall story rating should be used to rank the stories, and should be displayed more prominently than the average rating of the chapters.
I tend to judge a chapter against the rest of the chapters in the story anyway. I think that's how a chapter should be rated. There are some light-hearted and ridiculous stories where a silly chapter fits in perfectly and deserves a 5, but that doesn't mean that the story itself is better than another story whose criteria are intrinsically more strict.
A good example is the story where we write about why we write on Protagonize. Being nonfiction, there's not much criteria on which to base a rating other than the actual reason itself. Pretty much any reason for writing is a good one, so there's no way I could rate any of those chapters poorly. Yet I can think of many stories on the site which I would rate higher than that one if I had that option.
My suggestion is to let us rate the story as a whole, and of course we'll keep updating our rating as the story progresses. This would do a much better job reflecting the quality of the story. I think that the overall story rating should be used to rank the stories, and should be displayed more prominently than the average rating of the chapters.
I’m hopeful that Nick will like my idea
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Inappropriate?Hey Rachel,
While I see your point, I don't know if it'd work that well in practice. I'm not sure if you were around at the very beginning, but chapter/branch ratings were something I added a good month after launching the site. The original breakdown was just entire story ratings, which actually didn't work very well as no one updated their ratings after reading the story once... so stories with an uninteresting first chapter and subsequent really high-quality additions got stuck with low ratings.
The other problem was that author ratings were based entirely on stories that had been posted, and not on chapters or branches. So authors' individual ratings were shifting up and down with the quality of the entire story, and people who had contributed chapters afterwards were effectively not getting rated; all of their work was just contributing to the original story author's rating, good or bad.
That's why I added chapter/branch ratings and dropped the entire story rating. If you take a look at the blog, I think I posted about it at the time... yes, here it is:
http://blog.protagonize.com/2008/01/2...
I really want to make sure that authors get credit for the work that they post, be it the initial story post or anything afterwards. There are inherent problems with any rating system, but I think it's improving and adding Bayesian weights to negate unreasonably high or low ratings (think "hater-raters", etc.) that are out of the ordinary should help bring things under a bit more control.
Maybe the solution here is to continue allowing chapter ratings, but to also add an overall story rating separately, and have the story's complete rating be a combination of the ratings of its chapters, averaged with the independent overall story rating. That would kill two birds with one stone.
I'll give this some thought. Thanks for the insight!
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Inappropriate?Yes, I meant to specify *in addition* to the branch ratings. Authors' ratings should definitely be based on the branches they write, but bringing back the story rating too would probably help organize the content somewhat.
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