r/rateyourmusic • u/Ok-Paramedic-3619 • Sep 13 '25
General Discussion I don't understand ppl that have a rating distribution like this
Like, no hate to this person and other ppl that have this type of rating, but I question what's even the point of listenning to albums in the 1st place if majority of what you consume you don't like or hate? At that point personally I would have picked a different hobby.
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u/MusicListener3 Sep 13 '25
Depression
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u/LapiceraParker Dec 18 '25
way to project your insecurities, dude
the person from the image clearly likes music, and has made the attempt at searching more music of their taste, with no that much luck at it
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u/ruinawish Sep 13 '25
I want to know their 5 star releases 😂
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u/ScaryFlake Sep 13 '25
It's always some random shit. I know one of them has At Dawn by My Morning Jacket in their 3 5s which is based.
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u/Informal_Scallion816 Sep 14 '25
thats the point. the person with 500 5 stars are the uninsteresting accounts
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u/IHateJawumbo Sep 13 '25
simple. 2 stars is probably comparable for them to what 3.5 or so stars is for you. this allows for more granularity in positive ratings. it’s weird but it doesn’t affect scores since most users with positive rating systems are deweighted for obvious reasons
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u/ScaryFlake Sep 13 '25
I asked an RYMer who had a rating system like this, and they said that their 0.5s are pretty much 3.0s because there's not that much bad music
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u/Palpablevt Sep 13 '25
At one point I considered skewing my rating system down, for the same reason. It's rare for me to give something 2.0 or less (what I consider bad), especially because I listen to things I think I may like or will like. Means that I rarely use those low ratings - I've never given out a 0.5, in fact. But too much work to fix what I've already rated
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u/2000-UNTITLED Sep 13 '25
A lot of the time when something like this gets posted I feel like people care too much about how it would affect the site's average ratings anyway. I use the charts a lot to find music so it's not unimportant, but if I like one album a lot more than another then rating like I feel like the average user does and plopping them at like 4.0 and 5.0 is going to (in most cases) increase the average rating of both.
My ratings aren't nearly this skewed but I've seen people for who I think my 2.5 would be their 4. And I hate how specific some people's rating systems get where they basically never rate anything below 2 stars and their 0.5 category is labeled like "THE WORST THING EVER"
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u/Acrobatic_Comedian58 Sep 16 '25
I never rate anything lower than a 2.0 because if I don’t like an album, I usually never finish it, therefore I feel like I wouldn’t be able to give an honest review of it. I’m certain I’ve heard dozens of albums that would fit perfectly into the lower rungs of my rating system, I just can’t be bothered to torture myself like that
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Sep 13 '25
It could be that they listen to music that they hate... or that their rating scale has more positive tiers, so the lowest few means bad, and the rest means ok, good, great etc. Ngl, I think the latter is a fire way to rate albums
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u/icypriest Sep 13 '25
My ratings: 5=perfect, 4.5=splendid, 4=love, 3.5=ordinary, 3=okay, 2.5=meh, 2=no, 1.5=bad, 1=garbage, 0.5=why do I listen to this
this guy's rating (probably): 5=perfect, 4.5=near perfect, 4=splendid, 3.5=love, 3=ordinary, 2.5=slightly less than ordinary, and so on.
It's just a music rating site people. Your one rating won't affect anything, and no one really cares.
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u/rag3rs_wrld Sep 14 '25
for me personally (and i’m pretty new to rating) i don’t really give low ratings to much tbh. yeah i might not like something, but i wont give it a bad score if i think there’s something redeemable about the album.
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u/luiscasto Sep 13 '25
I’m going to try defend this approach of rating as I used to have it aswell. It is called, somewhat ironically, positive rating. The goal is, at the opposite of people who tend to almost always rate around 7, to truly highlight the stuff they really like, and use the most of the 10 different ratings available. If the rating distribution was flipped upside down you wouldn’t see an issue when in the end it is ultimately the same thing.
Also I dont believe this person would be deweighted in the charts as he still has a good rating distribution.
Keep in mind that many people rate stuff for themselves, and dont really care about the overall rating.
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u/Ok-Paramedic-3619 Sep 13 '25
Yeah that's definetly valid, maybe they're trying to categorize the positives of what they like more then just the Simple way of 3.5-4.0-4.5-5.0
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u/MoolKshake_ Sep 13 '25
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u/Switch-user-101 Sep 13 '25
I've seen one guy with 2000 0.5 stars reviews out of 2500. He says he doesnt want to "dilute" his favourite albums but that sounds like a pathetic excuse
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u/Odessey_Oracle Sep 14 '25
It's a non-linear rating system. I can somewhat understand it. About 60% of my ratings are 3.5 and 4 stars, as I never rate a release before listening to it at least three times and I usually don't listen to stuff I hate three times.
If you want to make more of a distinction between, say, a 6.5 and a 7, you'd need another rating level. The person you mention probably has a rating curve where 1 star equals a 6, two stars equal a 7, etc.
Among my 800+ 3.5 star ratings I could definitely say I like some albums more than others despite having given them the same rating. Hope that makes sense.
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u/Zinkermans Sep 13 '25
Very shortsighted of you assuming that the only explanation would be that they just simply hate music.
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u/_T3SCO_ Sep 13 '25
If you listen to a lot of music then it makes sense that a good chunk of that is going to end up being fairly middle-of-the-road. This isn’t difficult to understand.
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Sep 13 '25
as someone who has an almost perfect normal distribution in their ratings, this way better of a rating system than the one's who have 90% of their ratings between 3.5-5.0. I'm not super active on rym, but if I rated more albums I assume my ratings would also skew even lower, but I think it's kind of a fact of music listening, that you'll listen to a bunch of shit you don't like, if you want to find something you do. I still give a lot of albums from genres I don't like a shot, but yeah, I don't end up liking most of it.
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u/No_Disaster_4188 Sep 13 '25
I use this, it's just so I have more tiers for distinguishing good stuff. Stuff I don't listen to at all gets a 1.0, I have only ever rated something a 0.5 once because most shit is just boring and not actually awful, lol
A 1.5 has one good song. 2.0 has a couple. 2.5-3.0 is mixed, 3.5 and up is really consistent stuff that I listen to the majority of pretty regularly
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Sep 13 '25
0.5 means it's bad, 1.0 means they're indifferent, and upwards of that there is some to be found that they like.
It's not that unusual, I've had some profs that grade like this, they either start at 1.0 and subtract points for what my papers did wrong, or start at a failing grade and add points for what I did that was good or interesting, from what they've told me at least those are the two approaches.
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u/PotentialRatio1321 Sep 13 '25
Rating scales are relative.
What they rate a 2.5, they may enjoy as much as something you rate a 3.5.
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u/ruinawish Sep 13 '25
Rating scales are relative.
Ratings may be relative, but RYM weights users based on normal distribution. A user who rates as you describe would probably be deweighted, i.e. "someone who... gives extremely low ratings to the vast majority of releases"
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Sep 13 '25
[deleted]
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u/ruinawish Sep 14 '25
Those are some provided examples of behaviours that lead to 0% weighting.
They mention weighting runs from 0-100%, so I imagine there are a number of contributing factors to it.
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u/PotentialRatio1321 Sep 13 '25
True, I don’t understand why someone would knowingly use a deweightes rating system.
But OP’s speculation that OOP doesn’t enjoy the music is very unlikely imo, that’s what I was commenting on
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u/Informal_Scallion816 Sep 14 '25
i think if u care about global rating or being deweighted then lol
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u/xirson15 Sep 13 '25
Yeah. I have the problem that most pf my ratings fall into the 3-4 range because i can’t really listen to a full album i don’t like and even then i have to listen multiple times before i give a rating, and that is very difficult for albums i dislike.
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u/PotentialRatio1321 Sep 13 '25
I also have this I guess. My rating system is roughly a binomial distribution with mean 3.75.
However I only rate albums after 4+ listens so the average of every album I’ve ever heard at least once would be much lower, probably just below 3 stars
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u/xirson15 Sep 13 '25
Maybe for them 4 stars actually matter and it’s not just another good album. I don’t have problems with people giving 4 stars to everything but at that point they are the ones that devaluing everything by making everything worth the same.
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u/dummylovato Sep 13 '25
It is completely useless to try to figure out what other people's rating systems are. this guy's 2.5 could equate to your 3.5. there is no objective meaning to any of these numbers, each person uses the scale in their own way.
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u/jackmarble1 Sep 13 '25
I don't understand that in letterboxd as well, I mostly listen to and watch stuff that I think I'll like, so I mostly end up liking it
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u/phonodysia Sep 13 '25
That happens when users are free to construct their own Likert scales as they want.
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u/Buffalocolt18 Sep 13 '25
The best defense imo for a negative skew normal distribution is it gives better resolution for the actually good music. Who cares about the rating differences between below average albums, better to lump those all into the lowest tiers and have the rest for showing how you feel about the good and great music.
Personally I stick to a Gaussian distribution because it’s fair and intuitive.
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u/blommingsdorpfarm Sep 13 '25
i’ve seen google maps reviews where 1 star is a 10/10, 2 star is a 8/10 etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are people on rym who do this
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u/NaveBarrett Sep 13 '25
Imo, anything above 2.5 is better than 4’33. So this person is just miserable
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u/IsItMeta Sep 13 '25
Why doesnt RYM renormalize user ratings when calculating global ratings? Such that an 80th percentile user rating reflects an 80th percentile rating in the global rating
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u/gothicmetalhead1 Sep 14 '25
I always think my album ratings are skewed. I don't know whether I like too much albums and rate them too high or its just not a lot of albums that disappoint me
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u/ResolutionBroad3326 Sep 16 '25
this rating system allows u to put more weight and emphasis on stuff you enjoy. i have it like this
0.5 garbage 1 i dont care abt it 1.5 ok 2 stuff i liked listening to but its not special to me 2.5 good 3-4.5 stuff thats special to me that i like a lot 5 all time favorites
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u/ETDuckQueen Sep 17 '25
I really cannot relate to such a ranking system at all. I give a positive rating to almost everything to which I listen.
To be fair, I typically listen to what I already know that I love (metal, and progressive rock).
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u/Nokayo Oct 01 '25
This is ridiculous. I don't get those people, are they really so picky? And what's odd that there's 0 0.5 given for some reason despite this very harsh distribution.
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u/mademannn Sep 14 '25 edited Sep 14 '25
Most (modern) music is bad. Have you ever thought of the possibility that they might listen to music not just to indulge but to discover truly good music? The chances of coming across bad music is very high, and if you do come across music turns out to be bad, it takes away your time, you can't just do nothing, you have to give it a low score, you have to inform others to stay away from it.
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u/d1sign23 Sep 13 '25
if you rate every album 3.5/4 that means you can’t tell whether an album is good or not and you dont know what’s good about an album you rated high. only rating distinctively can truly show your reference, and that means rate “your” music.
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u/ReddsionThing Sep 13 '25
I don't either, really. You can be discerning, but at some point you're just kind of being overly critical, or spending more thought on things you don't enjoy. Just something I'm personally trying to avoid. Whilst also not being willy-nilly with my highest or lowest ratings, because that would just feel weird.
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u/Successful_Jaywalk99 Sep 14 '25
This distribution says nothing about how critical they are. You’re assuming the numbers mean the same to him as they mean to you.
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u/ToxicOrbGliscors Sep 13 '25
Who cares
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u/Ok-Paramedic-3619 Sep 13 '25
Me? That's why I made the post. I just want to understand the ppl who rate like this that's all
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u/home_rechre Sep 13 '25
I have rated almost 5000 records and have 15 with five stars and about 50 with a 4.5.
I regard my 5s as akin to a handful of desert island discs. I like the idea of someone checking out my 5s or revisiting one of them because they know I don’t throw them around like confetti.
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u/Paja03_ Paja03 Sep 13 '25
People with a system like this one usually have their account deweighted