Changes: Beer Hads, Full Reviews & Ratings

yeah, echo echo echo

i fear things have been a bit dilluted now, such that those with worthwhile things to say and constructive input are harder to locate, and the palates i care to hear from are lost in the wash. why did we do this?

 

Maybe I'm missing something but from the home page "beers/ recent reviews" used to be enjoyable, now it's useless. Can you filter out the "hads" on recent beer reviews? Also, since we are talking about site updates when will the top beers regions break up the ridiculous "West coast" region into something that resembles reality?

 

that said though, the filter hads feature and the display of many more reviews per page are both tremendously useful. so bravo for that! this site is the best!

 

You hit the nail on the head there and I didn't lose reviews other than different servings so no biggie.

 

It seems to me that having Hads count to a beer's overall score encourages quick and careless reviewing. If this change sticks, I can't wait to see what happens when EBF rolls around and hundreds of buzzed Beer Advocates are adding "Hads Scores" left and right to the beers they are ticking at the fest.

But I do like the .25 increments change. This was a long time coming IMO.

 

Dude, your post, while written seriously, was reactionary and judgmental in the extreme. I used humor to point that out. Even this response is duplicitous as you first claim "there are no rights and wrongs" then proceed to judge your post right and my post wrong.

 

At the very least, there needs to be a way to filter between the Hads and the actual reviews. I just went to go look for a review of Parabola and there were literally no reviews longer than a few words on the first page. Frustrating. Also, someone giving Parabola (or any beer for that matter) a "1" or a "5" with no explanation just doesn't seem right to me.

 

Reviews Attribute Scale: .25 increments have been applied for all attributes (Places too).

Much appreciated! Numerous positive repercussions (e.g., more accurate average ratings), including the not-so-obvious easier to review in many cases where a beer simply fell about midway between, say, 3 and 3.5

 

So I load up the beer page and click reviews and see a bunch of numbers and no reviews.

Yes, I can filter hads. But what if I was a new user who came to the site looking for opinions (this is how I found BA at first- googling beers and reading reviews) - would someone who came through a search engine like google see this when they pop up a beer?



If so, doesn't this kind of cheapen the quality of the site? Apologies if this has been addressed, long thread here.

 

i simply echo what many have said here.... not a fan of these changes. and don't like how the "Hads" have polluted the reviews

 

I like this implementation. I am new here, but I started using "Hads" to at least contribute, esspecially if I don't have time for a review.

I don't understand why people have such a low opinion of "Hads". Polluted? How is a larger more varied sample size "pollution"? Now the scores reflect the slice of the community that DOESN'T write reviews. If anything its making the beer scores a more accurate representation of the general consensus of the beer, which I thought was the whole point.

I have a feeling some of the more "Elitist" reviewers are feeling threatened, or that their reviews are somehow being watered down or made negligible by these changes.... but really people use BA to find out about beers they might want to try.. or not.. so i think it is useful. Very important that you don't have to sift through hads to read reviews. smart move.

 

I am going to politely join the outcry here. If somebody cannot constructively evaluate a beer, I have no interest in their opinion. Writing a review allows me to think about why I assign points in certain categories. I suspect it does the same for a lot of other people. Without being able to explain our scores, we may as well have two buttons: (Sucks / Doesn't Suck).

 

Same thing on the "recent reviews page" and I agree with you. I've always thought that a reviewer rating system or weighting system should be there with the heaviest/best rated reviewers reviews on top in a descending order. The old Karma system seemed a good fit IMO acting as a score multiplier and also encouraging thoughtful input rather than pokemon card type ticking. This change seems like a race to mediocracy rather than a change for excellence. But what do I know about marketing? bupkis.

 

I feel the same way about this page. I hope the Hads can be filtered here too.

 

I sincerely beg that this change doesn't also come to exist for PLACES.

 

There really is already a filter built in if you click on top reviewers, only reviews will show.

 

Yes. And that was one feature that made BA superior in quality over the alternative. Reviews should count, not ticks. A lot of us happen to think this way.

 

Couldn't have said it better.

It's a deal-breaker for me too when I'm in less than stellar drinking conditions (or tasting/sampling conditions). If I can't write a proper review on my smartphone while drinking the pint, it doesn't go on the site. But now just a vague recollection of whether I liked it or not will suffice. Not good.

 

What if you needed to tick 500 Hads before you could review. How many reviews can I trust if someone has had so few beers? How can they be subjective or objective in their review process? I refuse to write a review until I have had 500 different beers to fully understand the breadth and complexity of different and similar styles.

make your own site. I'll join.

 

I agree with you and I think the detail to reviews aspect you mention was a great focus that differentiated BA over others.