I’m sure this is going to cause a huge dispute on here, but why don’t we start letting ticks count towards the total? Currently they don’t count without a review, but I think we could boost eventual numbers on the site if their ticks actually counted for something. I’d propose that they don’t count the same way that a full review counts. As in, ticks count like one tenth of a full review – this will help limit artificial inflation of rates the way Untappd has miller light as a four out of 5 for example. Plus, once people tick for a bit, it might encourage them to get more into it.
Just a thought – I think it’s just about fixing the algorithm so that they weigh a lot less than full ratings. Seems like we aren’t exactly growing in leaps and bounds, so it’s something worth thinking about.
Do you mean count towards the score? or peoples rating counts? Better would be to show more data - e.g. a score for Ratings Only, and a score for Ratings + ticks imho.
Despite the seemingly slow demise of the site, I am vehemently against merging ticks and ratings—unless you want to water down what reputation RB’s reviews currently have compared to UT, where infected beers are routinely rated high by uneducated consumers.
Unless the raison d’être of the site has completely changed, this site has always been geared towards generating review+rating content and statistics based on this. Adding the tick functionality made sense for the users who are that way inclined, but excluding them from the statistics is necessary in order to preserve any integrity this database has.
If ticks are counted statistically, then I would only support them being counted in a totally separate way, like what @jercraigs suggested.
I would lovet to let tick counts, but before doing that I will suggest an change in RB.
Today I am using Ticks as a “marking” of the beers I have tasted or have inhouse that I am going to tatste.
When I rate them I move them to full rating with description and all that and propper rating, my “tick rating” is nor representative ofr final rating. In other word I am using Ticks today as a scrapbook.
I have done tht because that is fast and easy to do.
If they want to move tick to counting ratings now they need inplace a simple system where you can just with one click on the beer mar it for a easy accessible picklist for later full rating.
I normaly tick 0.2 or so on the tick ratings so that would look beautiful on the statistic for the beer if those starts count.
I am totally against the ticks counting towards your overall rating score. We are Ratebeer not Tickbeer. The ticks are counted and I wouldn’t be against a separate listing of total ticks, but they should not affect our overall stats.
Yes, count towards the score. But showing more data might work too. Beers could have score overall and score of ticks.
My whole point is that rather than die out because we’re too stubborn to change, maybe we should embrace the new ways. But we’d still weigh the ticks far less than a full review on the beer’s score.
Right now RateBeer is, pretty useless when it comes to see quickly if a beer is a must have or not because of the low rating counts, all beers have average scores unless the place is very old (legacy beers) or very trendy…
Having tick scores somehow would remove the need to always have to check Untappd all the time for representative scores.
Why try to replicate UT and ultimately end up as a less comprehensive version of it? Better to retain the competitive advantage that RB has, even if it has many magnitudes fewer users. UT is only more “representative” in terms of representing what the average, non-beer geek consumer thinks – RB represents, I hope, a different level/type of beer aficionado, who necessarily exist in smaller numbers. More data is not necessarily better if that data is low quality.
It is not lower quality if you keep ticks displayed apart from reviews (for example, on a secondary tab)
It is far less low quality to have all beers with low rating scores because they all have low rating counts.
I get what you are saying, but sadly, I don’t think it would help bring up participation significantly more and would ultimately create even more laziness and eventually you’d have even fewer descriptive reviews than we already have. Hell, the minimum character limit is 75 which is the equivalent of about 10-15 words. If someone can’t type that, quite frankly, I find it pretty pathetic and you really don’t care about beer at all.
Agreed. And it’s not just beers, whole breweries are going under the radar here. The fact is active userbase (which I suspect is less than 2k) can’t keep up with the growing beer scene despite the effort.
Frankly I don’t understand what is this high quality data. Just to quote @Sarlacc83
An RB rating, individually, is worth more than an Untappd rating.
But 5 RB ratings (or fewer) is worth quite a bit less than 100+ Untapped reviews.
If beers are around for only a short period of time, so they don’t accumulate enough ratings, then that’s because the brewer’s decided against brewing them again. Why was that - did the brewer not even think they were good enough to repeat? If so, it’s really not a “must have” - the brewer’s told you it’s not even a “must make”. The problem is not with ratebeer, it’s with the culture of demanding a constant stream of “new” things (which are mostly indistinguishable from the old things, just with new names slapped on them). The problem is people who call good beers that have passed the test of time “legacy beers”.
IMHO denying that problem exists is the part of the problem. Yes, the landscape of beer scene has changed over the years and there are many one offs which won’t be brewed again.
If goal of RB is to serve as reference only for widespread beers then we’re good. However we have to accept that in that case RB is becoming irrelevant.
5 years ago when I was choosing backup for UT I went with RB over BA. Reason behind the decision was many beers missing in BA.
Most breweries over here in Quebec, Canada don’t have enough users /reviews/ Ratings to seriously think to plan a beer trip (if you want to select the best places first, other than a few legacy places that were existing when RB was at its prime 10 years ago)… You have to use UT if you want to do that… And it’s a shame…
Personally I feel that the overall score is fine as is and should NOT take ‘tick’s into consideration. That’s what the 5-star rating is for.
The biggest concern for me is when something is referred to as ‘private’, it infers that it is strictly confidential; it will only ever be seen by myself and not exposed to anyone else (this includes admins and brewers).
It’s always been a difficult to approach this and I have always felt there are improvements to be made here. I’m sure there is a way that we can better communicate what ’full reviews/5-star ratings’ are without relying on the words ‘public/private/ticks’.
From my perspective, ideally when users are referencing the scores, they should hopefully be making the following connections:
Overall score: How the professionals and beer lovers/enthusiasts have scored this beer.
5-star rating: How the community have scored this beer; it’s a raw and unbiased look at how the beer has been received.
If we can achieve this… I’m confident that:
The significance/weighting of the overall score remains untouched.
Our 5-star ratings can be used more effectively (because they are transparent for everyone to see).
i am concerned by a lot of the phrasing there. I think you are implying a lot of things you may not mean too.
I agree that “private” is terrible and shouldn’t really have been used. I assume it was a compromise between allowing ‘ticks’ and not allowing them. The fact that people have a bunch of ticks/private ratings that they are not necessarily using the same way we use full ratings is a huge problem for transitioning.
re: overall score: Uhm, What professionals scores are we including?
Separating beer lovers/enthusiasts from the “community” feels… inappropriate.
The simplest option is to show the overall score (based on current system) and a “combined score” (based on full ratings + “ticks”).
This starts to look bad though for beers with low numbers of ratings though. For example if a beer has five ratings the bayesian system brings down the score. So the Overall Score would potentially show as MUCH lower than the Combined Score if there are lots of ticks. For most beers the overall score becomes meaningless since the Combine Score (or even the Mean Average) gives a much better sense of how good the beer is. Basically the bayesian weighting doesn’t really work well any more since so many entries will never graduate to 10+ ratings.
