Changes: Beer Hads, Full Reviews & Ratings

I don't know if it was mentioned but my only real issue with the "Hads" being weighted into the overall score is that clearly most people are going based on memory of the beer they may have had months ago, I'm not saying that this is the case with every person adding "Hads" but its clear when someone has 100-200 "Hads" in one day and they are all Cantillon, Drie Fonteinen, DL Variants etc. that these came from memory. I just dont see how these scores should count towards the beer's overall score. The same could be said with full reviews, but is probably less likely that someone would go through the trouble to write 250 charachters based on memory or something they had 8 months back at a tasting somewhere. I myself am behind in reviewing and have 20-25 reviews to enter from the last 3 weeks or so but I have detailed and dated notes with scores to work from.

I will still continue to use the site like I always had but thats just my .02 on the change.

 

So you are saying because a simple had marked with a numeric score holds the same weight as a written review that people are more likely to forego the reviewing process? That's possible, but that is where a system of recognition of well written reviews would come in. Being able to click if a review was helpful to you should give people the incentive to put their opinions out there if they see their opinions are being well received.

Todd also said they are working on ways to reward people for adding such content to the site, so I think going forward you are still going to have plenty of people adding reviews. Some will be great and some will barely hit the new character limit, but that is where filtering comes in, you should be able to sort by "Most Helpful".

 

I am content with the Bros making changes to the site they created even though the changes don't always work as well for me in the way I use the site. Currently my "Hads" and "Reviews" are about equal but my use of "Hads" has been growing. When a beer has numerous reviews, I don't think adding one more adds much value. I have been using "Hads" as my personal reminder of what beers I will consider for a repeat purchase. For me, 3.5 or higher is a repeat. As I know I like certain styles more than others ( or perhaps more correct to say that I dislike certain styles more than others), my hads are skewed toward my personal preferences. It may be hard for me to give an accurate review to a Porter as I've yet to find one I liked. I don't think I'm alone in this as one simply has to look at the higher ratings dominated by high ABV beers. While I do look at reviews I tend to pay more attention to the Bros reviews than most of the others. That is not to say I always agree with them ( I really like Dale's Pale Ale more than they do) I consider them a good baseline. I often try a new beer before reading any reviews and then compare my impressions to the Bros and a few other reviews - more in the spirit of self education.

As with most changes, I expect we will see unintended consequences. Some will be good and some won't. That's the way these things work. But I expect the Bros and their team will be looking at this and make adjustments as time goes by.

 

Well this is irritating! I keep track of my "hads" in a notebook to update all at once when I get online. Now with this new thing happening, I can't do multiple hads in a short amount of time. When I try the site says "you just had a beer very recently." What the hell? I can't always be sitting at the computer when I'm making notes on a beer!

 

These two are exactly what I would like to see, and would alleviate pretty much all my concern over the hads merger (though there are plenty of other good suggestions, too).

And thank you, Bros! I really like how you make a change, get our reactions, make incremental changes to suit, etc. You do a great job managing the site and keeping in touch with your community (despite all the bitching and moaning), especially considering the sheer size of it. Cheers!

 

While this discussion is approaching the point of ad nauseam repetition of the same core arguments, I suppose I'll give my two cents as well, moving from the positive to the critical.

1. Allowing .25 increments in reviews: godsend. Anything that allows more nuance and differentiation is a good thing. Thank you Bros!

2. Incorporating Hads scores into a beer's rating: entirely correct. All user feedback should count, and since many like to use Hads to score beers it's only fair to let their voices be heard in a beer's overall score.

3. Weighting Hads equally with Reviews: less great. Not to malign those who use Hads, but there is simply no possibility for accountability with these scores the way there is with reviews. It's easy to spot, flag, and remove troll reviews that only exist to inflate or deflate a beer's score, but there's absolutely no way to tell the difference between a sincere 5 Had and a 5 Had from the brewer's mom. Also, since Hads originally existed with only an imprecise whole-number rating scale, and did so when they were first introduced and lots of people instantly entered hundreds if not thousands of backlogged ratings (often from memory), it's no wonder that they are inflating scores significantly. The dramatically increased bar of entry for the Top 100 is ample evidence for this. Since reviews (generally) require considerably more thought than Hads, are less prone to abuse, and are easier to hold accountable, I believe they should carry more weight than Hads - perhaps 67/33, 75/25, or even 90/10.

4. Showing Hads on a beer's page: useless. I wouldn't mind a "show Hads" check box as an option for anyone who actually desires this, but to make it the default just clutters up a beer listing and makes it harder to find useful information. If all I care about is the beer's score, I won't look beyond the rAvg. If I'm looking down at the review portion of the listing, I want to see what people have said about the beer's aroma, flavor, texture, etc. I couldn't care less that beerluvrrr69 gave it a 4.0 as a Had yesterday - no offense to beerluvrrr69, of course.

5. Limiting the frequency of inputting Hads: needlessly and counterproductively obstructive. Your stated reasoning behind these changes was to make the site more user-friendly and, particularly, Had-friendly, so why on earth make it harder to use this part of the site? As much as it seems to be moving in that direction (and doubtless will even moreso once the App comes out), BA isn't Untappd, and there's no obvious benefit to requiring that Hads be entered immediately upon consumption the way Untappd check-ins provide a real-time, Four-Square-enabled picture of who's drinking what where when. If I used Hads, I would doubtless use them to catalogue everything I tried at a tasting or festival and would want to upload a bunch of them at once. I see no harm in allowing this, and a very real annoyance with not allowing it.

6. Reducing the character requirement for reviews: terrible. Horrible. Ghastly. Here's a 102-character review I just made up for an imaginary IPA: "Clear amber, nice head/lace. Smells hoppy - floral and fruity. Tastes good, not too bitter. Creamy medium body. I like it." Sure, it's manages to hit every one of the 5 categories, and it's arguably better than a lot of "reviews" on the other site, but it's careless and pointless. 250 characters was already a very low bar - less than two tweets! - so I fail to see the point in going even lower. Hads are already there for those who want to tick a beer without taking the time to review it, so who is really benefiting from being allowed to write desultory reviews? People who want to copy/paste their ratings from the other site? One of the things that has always set BA apart from the competition has been that the reviews here, on average, are far more detailed, descriptive, coherent, and therefore helpful than the personal tasting notes that are encouraged elsewhere. I don't always write long reviews, but even my shortest ones done in the biggest hurry have never dropped below the 250 mark. I honestly can't imagine how little I would have to care to write 100-character reviews, but I know for a fact that it wouldn't do anybody any good to make them public.

Cheers!

 

This one is really bothering me. I'm trying to go through and but a little more "thought" behind my hads. When it started, I rated close to 100 beers a 5, because they were better than a 4. Trying to go through and revise this has been a nightmare. I got through the 5's, but I won't be doing the rest until this changes.

Other than that, I don't mind the changes. I could see hads being worth less than full reviews in the grand scheme of things, but ultimately, it won't matter. Hads are a lot easier, so a lot more people will use them. Character count doesn't matter to me either. I don't review but maybe one beer a month, and I try to write a full review when I do. If Hads=Reviews in weight, at least the person tried to do a description.

 

It's a little hard to keep up with this thread and everything that has been addressed, so forgive me if someone mentioned this....

Could we have the toggle on the beer pages be opposite of the new default? Reviews should be the default with the Hads having the toggle option. When looking up a beer quickly on the go, app or not, I'm pretty sure the most of us want to skim through a couple of reviews, not see general scores. Most of the beer pages I have looked at only have 1 or 2 reviews sandwiched around hads. This creates the need to go through multiple pages to get a decent sense of a beer.

 

Bottom line: A full review that actually took longer than the click of a checkbox should have significantly more value than a quick "had" rating.

 

I agree with you - there are multiple ways to recognize and incentivize people to provide useful information and content onto the site. BA just needs to figure out a good way to do it. They also need to display the most useful information at the top so that members and non-members can both access that information easily.

 

This has got to be the most important change the Bros need to make, for their sake. New users need to be shown the most useful content very easily. I know the interface well enough to manipulate it and have a bit more patience to find it, but a new user will not be as insightful or patient without the familiarity of and reliance on the site.

 

How much more value should a 3000 word review have over a 1000 word review?

 

Great post. I especially agree with your points 3-5. There really is no need to show the Had score in with the reviews. A time limit in between entering of Hads is also highly annoying and counter productive.

 

Probably less, since 3000 words is about 15 pages of text, and any genuinely useful information would likely be hidden pages deep.

I think most would agree that beer reviews generally exhibit a bell curve of sorts when length and usefulness are compared: really short ones and really long ones are equally useless, while a middle ground delivers the most value: concise enough to read quickly, detailed enough to relate a full experience of the beer.

We all know that a wall of text can be counterproductive, but would anybody seriously argue that NorthYorkSammy reviews are more helpful than Buckeyenation reviews? Or, more objectively, that ANY review by definition includes infinitely more information than a Had?

 

As someone with a lot of reviews, I'm very much against the lowering the bar on review size to only 100 characters. I put a lot of thought into my reviews and would hope others would do the same.

IMO BA >>> ratebeer because of the higher reviewing standards, better categorization, limits on reviews per day, mathematical formulations*, and better rating parameters (especially with the new 0.25 increments).

Reviewers (in general) probably put much more thought into their ratings than "hads" tickers. Just food for thought on weighting ratings verses hads.

The one thing ratebeer has over BA is the rating overall and rating per category. More food for thought.

*I can't stand that "drag everything to the mean" thing that rb does

 

I've also been trying to update some Hads of mine where I gave a 5 when the only options were 1,2,3,4,5, but I would now like to give them a little more nuance. However, one thing I noticed is that in some cases (when a brewery has closed, I think) it's no longer possible to go back and edit the rating. Sure would be nice if that were possible.

 

Honestly, I prefer the tweet style reviews. For me, they generally have the best fact/opinion ratio. A lot of reviewers like to see themselves type it seems, and it's hard to figure out what exactly they ended up drinking.

This was posted on the first page as a consequence of moving the minimum character count to 100, and given the context, used as a negative argument. I think that review is pretty well perfect, myself. Covers the basics and doesn't add fluff.

Also, the argument here isn't that 1 had == 1 review, information wise. It's that 100 hads >= 1 review. And personally, I think that holds more weight and delivers more actual information than the one review.

 

I don't know if this has been brought up, because frankly I didn't feel like reading through 8 pages of people voicing their opinion. But will you be able to add a new beer now by just putting it in your hads without a full review?

 

I guess we just disagree on what we want out of reviews, my fellow Hobbes. You're right that the tweet-style reviews have a higher fact/opinion ratio, but for me, most of the value in a review is the opinions and subjective impressions of the beer, especially if they're well-described -- what you call "fluff".

From the discussion in this thread it looks like we'll have plenty of reviewers in both camps, though, which is fine by me as long as we get something like that "mark this review insightful" suggestion.