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(-1)

Alright fair enough. You know that a 1-star rating hurts a lot when it comes to small independent work though, right? Going out of your way to rate something 1 stars is saying you dislike something enough to hurt a project. I’d urge you to reconsider consider or at least if you’re going to give 1 stars leave a reason for the review.

I'm not going out of my way when I rate content; rating content is the method that itch.io makes available for me to conveniently track what I've read and how much I liked it.  If there was an option to have all my ratings private - not visible to the creator or my (zero) followers - I would enable that.

(-1)

That feature may be convenient to you but I hope you understand that it also really hurts content creators in terms of visibility and discovery via any platform’s algorithm.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/the-fault-in-five-stars

Especially in niche communities where the audience reach is a matter of thousands if not hundreds.

(1 edit) (+1)

Thanks for the informative read. It sounds like what you're suggesting is that I should use a 5-star rating as a 'seal of approval' and not provide any rating at all for anything I wouldn't consider to be worth of 5-stars, is that right? Thereby promoting content that I feel should have increased visibility, but not potentially decreasing the visibility of other content?

(+2)(-1)

Pretty much! Unfortunately, the five star review system tends to only reward participation if the recipient receives full marks. Doubly the case for independent content, where there is often a lack of visibility and the sample size of participants/reviews is thus incredibly small. Every vote counts, and you help immensely when you rate something 5 stars, but you also hinder much more than you would think for anything less than 5, especially a 1.

(+3)

I'll go back and reconsider all my previous ratings through this new binary lens and adjust them accordingly. Thanks for taking the time to explain.

What a truly cordial and educational exchange! We need more of these. Well done, the both of you.