Freesound Forums

I'm wondering if the rating system often has a negative effect on the users. I may be coming at this from the wrong angle but I upload my sounds (good or bad - you decide) for people to use in any way they wish. My belief is that there are a lot of creative and highly skilled users who can edit the sound, sample a fraction or whatever and use it in very different ways. Other people may be looking for something just to drop into a video unedited.

I think I've noticed a trend that people will happily download unrated sounds, but as soon as an anonymous user gives a sound a two star or three star rating, other users stop downloading the sound. Presumably they just ignore it as being not good. Sadly, that may not be the case. It may be the perfect sound for them.

Anyway, I think it's a shame that the rating system can put people off listening to clips that were happily listened to and downloaded before the negative rating.

I agree

I think that the rating system should not exist at all.
I like the comment more. Most of the time the comment is more realistic. Most of the people giving comments are friendly ore have realistic Ideas to improve my work. I like that more than starts

@klankbeeld

Yes, comments are good. A lot can be learned from an honest criticism.
I think it's funny that people take the time to (often anonymously) give a free sound a low rating. Like I said on twitter when someone gave one of my sounds 2 stars yesterday, "If I thought it was good I would have charged!".

Anyway, thank you @klankbeeld for taking the time to comment on this post. It's good to know I'm not the only one who thinks the way I do.

Ratings are kind of useless for the reasons aforementioned.

But do you really believe that a user searching for a particular sound will look at the rating and then not bother to audition the sound? I really doubt that.

Personally I don't even acknowledge ratings, not even on my own sounds.

Headphaze wrote:
But do you really believe that a user searching for a particular sound will look at the rating and then not bother to audition the sound?

Yes, I do. Depends how important the sound is to you of course. If say you search for "snare" and a lot of choices come up, the tendancy would be to skip the ones someone has already said are rubbish. On the other side of that arguement is clearly seen in a certain massive online bookshop. There's always one jerk who's given a great book one star cos he hadn't read the discription properly. If you skipped all the books with one star you'd never choose one.

If you could only rate when commenting, at least we'd know why they thought it was so bad. Then we could maybe learn from the criticism/advise. I think my main concern with the rating system is that people can give someone's work one star and you don't know who or why. It's not as though they are paying customers!

The main problem here is that sounds don't get rated enough to make a good average rating.

A lot of my sounds only have one rating, and that means the individual's subjective opinion is presented as the ultimate verdict.

Rating only whilst commenting sounds like a logical alternative, but this doesn't really fix anything. Ratings only showing for a sound that have a minimum amount of submissions, this would counteract this single rating bias.

As i've said before, when I search for sounds, the rating isn't even something that crosses my mind; I always audition the sound to hear it. I understand that not everyone has this same approach, and a lot of people are impatient when doing searches, so they may look to ratings to gauge the quality.

Headphaze wrote:
Ratings only showing for a sound that have a minimum amount of submissions, this would counteract this single rating bias.

I like that. I think you've got it sussed!
Mind you, as people use the samples for a massively wide variety of purposes, perhaps rating is irrelevant. what's good for one is useless for another.

If there is a rating system, I think your idea is excellent

Yeah, as I said, I don't think there should be a rating system at all. Because obviously it's biased. All it takes is one poor rating by a user who arguably has an entirely subjective opinion about a particular sound to ruin the reputation of that upload.

This is a topic that's cropped up several times in the past few years, so you're not alone with your concerns.

Headphaze wrote:
But do you really believe that a user searching for a particular sound will look at the rating and then not bother to audition the sound? I really doubt that.

In this twiter and Facebook generation, where everything is immediate and expected to be free (or paid for by someone else) some young kids have very short attention spans. They no longer amaze at the amazing things the internet can do. For them is a given, was here when they were born, they grew with it and expect everything to be there for free and to be easy.
I have seen people comment on sounds saying things like. "It is good, just what I need. Can you make it louder?" - Well... download the damn sound, get it into a sound editor and do it yourself!

The point being. Yes, unfortunately some people will just want to look at the "best" sounds. IF you grew up with Facebook, it is all about how many likes you have got. So any sound that is not 5 star is too uncool even to listen to!

Someone who is really considering using the sound is likely to want to audition many sounds before choosing.
However, not every user that comes here to download something knows well how this site works. So I guess many may still follow the ratings system as a good indicator. I think that is confirmed by PapercutterJohn experience with the effect of ratings on sound downloads.

AlienXXX wrote:
I have seen people comment on sounds saying things like. "It is good, just what I need. Can you make it louder?" - Well... download the damn sound, get it into a sound editor and do it yourself!

I haven't been recording or using the site for long but I happily stumbled across a comment that said "Make it shorter" to which the reply was "Make it shorter yourself you lazy t**t!" (Their's wasn't asterixed).

I've been laughing about that one ever since. But yes, you're right, a lot of people want everything wrapped up and perfect, which is strange because I tend to upload quite long recordings so people can take the short section they want and edit it. If you do too much yourself you may be limiting people's creative choices.

I guess that's the inherant problem. If you upload clips that have room for other people to creatively tweak, you're going to get negative ratings from the uncreative people who just want to take the perfect clip. I'm going to stick with my habit of uploading stuff people can play about with. More people can get use of it that way.

If I've heard right I think the general belief is that the rating system doesn't help much so it's up to users to ignore the ratings and think for yourself, (which the truly creative would do anyway I guess).

AlienXXX wrote:
everything is immediate and expected to be free (or paid for by someone else) some young kids have very short attention spans. They no longer amaze at the amazing things the internet can do. For them is a given, was here when they were born, they grew with it and expect everything to be there for free and to be easy.
I have seen people comment on sounds saying things like. "It is good, just what I need. Can you make it louder?" - Well... download the damn sound, get it into a sound editor and do it yourself!

Generation Z is like a syndrome

@John
We've witnessed much worse in terms of commenting.
Check this thread for many many laughs!

http://www.freesound.org/forum/freesound-project/33512/

Headphaze wrote:
We've witnessed much worse in terms of commenting.
Check this thread for many many laughs!

http://www.freesound.org/forum/freesound-project/33512/

Haha! There's some good ones! Hope I'm quick witted enough to deal with what's inevitably coming. I think I'm up to it, lol (Famous last words).

I generally think that the star ratings are not the most useful thing for locating quality sounds compared to tagging, descriptions, a bit of patience and those ever-useful ears.

I don’t necessarily get annoyed about it, although occasionally (on a more general level) I get frustrated by the culture of rating and commenting on everything that seems prevalent in the modern world. To be fair on social media culture, it far predates that — I remember when ‘txt msgin’ was the new and hip thing and radio presenters would spend five minutes after playing a new song reading out opinions that people you didn’t know or care about had just thumbed into their Nokia 3310.

(As an aside, another thing that I find hilarious/tragic is when people accuse bloggers who exercise editorial control over their comments, or as in my case don’t have a comment function at all, of “violating others’ right to free speech”! As if your right to stand on a soapbox and insult me obliges me to provide you with said soapbox, a PA system and light refreshments for that purpose...)

Personally, I like being able to take someone else’s sound and edit it to make it my own. I just find it, forgive the term, kind of lame to expect someone else to make all the sounds I want for me.

PapercutterJohn wrote:
Haha! There's some good ones! Hope I'm quick witted enough to deal with what's inevitably coming. I think I'm up to it, lol (Famous last words).

Don’t worry John, I think that abusive comments are the exception rather than the rule on FS compared to, say, YouTube. Besides, your sounds are great, so if anyone bad-mouths them I’ll jump them behind the bike sheds.

I think this screenshot tells you everything you need to know about the "most common downloader" on freesound.

http://s3.postimg.org/eacoglqur/Capture.png

No comments, no attributions (even though it's attribution license)... but what can you do....

jamesabdulrahman wrote:
I’ll jump them behind the bike sheds.

Could have done with you at my school! Funnily enough, I'm not worried about it at all. Thanks for the kind words about my sounds by the way. Just beginning, so hope future ones will show constant improvement. If not I'll have fun playing verbal chess with the jerks.

As with everything on the internet, you can't see the people making the comments, so it is easy to mis-judge.
Even when someone writes "it's good, can you make it shorter/longer/louder?" Maybe it is a 12 year old doing a school project and this is the first sound he downloaded from the internet... Although that is unlikely. Especially as 12 year olds these days tend to know more about computers than we do!

Anyway, just in case, (if I am in a good mood) sometimes I would respond to say "Download Audacity and you can easily do that yourself."

But some people write "you are a f*gg*t" or "F*** you" - For those simply use the 'report' button and delete the comment. There is obviously no value in responding to such comments.

AlienXXX wrote:
As with everything on the internet, you can't see the people making the comments, so it is easy to mis-judge.

VlatkoBlazek wrote:
I think this screenshot tells you everything you need to know about the "most common downloader" on freesound.

http://s3.postimg.org/eacoglqur/Capture.png

No comments, no attributions (even though it's attribution license)... but what can you do....

You know a lot of schools use Freesound as a platform for lesson material, so It wouldn't surprise me if a good portion of downloads came from these types of users. Hence why the profiles are blank.

Headphaze wrote:

You know a lot of schools use Freesound as a platform for lesson material, so It wouldn't surprise me if a good portion of downloads came from these types of users. Hence why the profiles are blank.

I understand that, but they can comment and attribute, can't they? At least they can tell us what our sounds are being used for. The sounds are free... And the download to comment/attribution ratio is just ridiculous. But I guess it's too much of a problem