MeriemR It is not about those 1star reviews.
What people are upset about is the 3.5 star review of several hundred words, written with care and written in good faith, that got deleted and on top sometimes also getting an insulting personal message.
The kind of author people are talking about who calls people a dog when he/she/it is not agreeing with you.

All this behavior just to boost their rating, which actually is not important at all, since what counts are the chapters being read, the rankings and the chapters being paid for, also gifts and support through patreon/kofi and the like.

    MeriemR it's not about the feasibility of a 3rd party moderation team, it's about the current system which encourages shity reviews for exp and the authors ability to delete criticism. These need to be dealt with ASAP,reviews give ZERO insight into a novel because it's an advertisement at this point.

      MeriemR
      Maybe it's just me, but I tend to ignore all the 1star and 5star reviews because they generally don't tell me anything. Like when I buy things on Amazon, I always look for what people find wrong about it, and decide for myself if I'm bothered by it.
      Guess I'm just one of those that genuinely does not care about ratings.

        MiddleEastern well I went back to reading on websites of translators, since people only translate web novels, which were successful and which they liked.
        Don't know what got me to open up WN forums lol. Nothing changed, it is still the same mess.
        Still frustrated readers and authors with god complex. TBH most, like 90%, of original novels on this platform suck, contracted authors and premium novels included. Too many think they can make quick bucks and there are no editors, so quality is sometimes nonexistent and what WN cares about is the word count, hence the 100k words before any novel can go premium.
        As you said it is about money, no one really cares about the quality of these "novels". If quality was considered 99% of the content here would never be published.

            I've been Ranked #1 too. In the opposite direction at Rank#1111111110101010 XD

            Okay. That was a lame joke. Cue canned laughter. Although that rank position is relatively correct.

            I find it hard to believe this discussion is still going on.

            Reviews are worthless as a rule, and the whole system is a joke. 95% or more of so-called reviews aren't even reviews. They're mind farts.

            What's sad is that so many readers are guided by those silly little stars. And that they waste time reading that 'review' crap instead of reading the story.

            If they bothered to read the first page of the story, they would x) instantly know whether they personally like it or not, y) develop their own critical faculties, z) save themselves tons of time. It takes less time to read a page of a story than to dig through dozens of asinine 'reviews'.

            I think the whole system was set up that way so that kids who want to write could engage in interaction. It was never meant to be a serious system, just something to encourage people to get more involved (and maybe watch more ads while they're at it. I wouldn't know, I don't use the app).

            So my suggestion would be to stop treating the review system with seriousness it doesn't deserve. I use it solely (and rarely) to encourage kids who clearly have talent to keep going.

            And yes, authors definitely should have the right to delete the bullshit masquerading as 'reviews'. But it's probably best just to ignore it.

              Veronica8 Yes I agree, the authors should only be able to remove spam posts and real content reviews should be locked. Short one liners or two liners should be comments on chapters not on the book as a review. It would be an easy fix too, all webnovel would have to do was make sure that the reviews have a word count they can't be below. They have it all over their site, the word count limits in certain places, just not reviews. Which astounds me. The letting authors only delete spam and not good criticisms how they would implement that baffles me. I legit have no clue. But it would be nice and a girl can dream. XD

                  KitKatxKK Reviews have a min requirement of 140 characters, which doesn't help much. Ask them to increase it, maybe, so there can be longer Imma-smash-mah-keyboard-and-see-what-melody-it-makes.

                      bottosapien Unfortunately people would just google something random and post an excerpt of some random website or something similar. I'm actually surprised more of the spam reviews aren't that already since that takes much less effort than spamming 140 random characters on your keyboard.

                        7 days later

                        chu_chan I've read couple of books from this site, and most of the big authors act like they are on a high horse, legit if you roam the top rankings only few are actually gems, while most are what you call just decent books. The story are littered with the wuxiac formula and cliche troupes, that literally you can't expect something new. And I don't like complaining about writing style but I really suggest if the authors step up on their game, put some ambience on their writing, perhaps avoid flat lines if they can. George RR Martin is a God, dude, you can't compare him with anyone here, his diverse characters are very realistic, not to mention they all collide on a plot that forks into multitude of possibilities and the twists are consistent. Most big authors here only focus on their main character, and on a single plot, I also dislike the fact they kept dumbing down their female leads. Well just an observation.

                          Most authors here in Webnovel are not typing to improve but typing to earn money. Here in this website, there are only a few authors who respect constructive criticisms but the rest? Hell no. All they care about is their stupid ratings and bullshit five star reviews. I reviewed a fanfic yesterday and poof, it got deleted. The author even said he appreciates all forms of criticisms, and then in the next day he deleted my review. I'm getting triggered by WN's system here. Don't give the rights to the authors to delete their reviews. it's a waste of time to depend on rigged ratings.

                          Most authors here in Webnovel are not typing to improve but typing to earn money. Here in this website, there are only a few authors who respect constructive criticisms but the rest? Hell no. All they care about is their stupid ratings and bullshit five star reviews. I reviewed a fanfic yesterday and poof, it got deleted. The author even said he appreciates all forms of criticisms, and then in the next day he deleted my review. I'm getting triggered by WN's system here. Don't give the rights to the authors to delete their reviews. it's a waste of time to depend on rigged ratings.

                          20 days later

                          I reviewed a novel called "New Age of Summoners". The novels grammar and storyline are terrible beyond comparison, at least until the 100 chapter after that I dropped it. I wrote a 1 star review because of the grammar and storyline and it got deleted. I saw a few other 1 and 2 star review at that time. I revisited the novel site today and found my review deleted, but not only mine but all reviews under 3 stars are nonexistent. The worst thing is that the novel has a rating of 4.6 even though its terrible and got many negative reviews before. The support didnt give ashit when i reported this. This system is incredibly stupid and broken.

                          Dyrem Omg yes I hate looking through the reviews and seeing the same three people give five stars with only EXP!!!! as pretty much their Entire Review. It’s such a waste like, at least add something, anything!

                              Dyrem Omg yes I hate looking through the reviews and seeing the same three people give five stars with only EXP!!!! as pretty much their Entire Review. It’s such a waste like, at least add something, anything!

                                  To be honest, I rarely bother reading reviews much less rely on the star rating. Most reviews are either trolls being trolls or authors/fans rigging said review section. What I usually do is simply go to the Browse section and select a genre I'd love to read (i.e. romance, fanfiction, comics) then select either Updated or Collection.

                                  Updated = I can see that said novel is still active or new
                                  Collection = Number of possible readers = It got to be good if lots of people read it? (I rarely use this method)

                                  Then I read around 5~20 and sometimes up to 40 chapters (depending on available chapters) based on how engaged I got to a novel. Some may consider that 5~20 chapters aren't enough to check whether a novel is truly good or not but this is why being able to write a good Prologue/Intro is a must, it allows the author to hook in readers.

                                  Back when I still used the review function, I honestly tried to write a constructive criticism free of bias as much a possible with a clear format
                                  2stars = I don't plan on reading the novel in the future
                                  3stars = I plan to revisit the novel and see whether the author improved or at least tried to improve on what irked me away from the novel (i.e. grammar, character, plot, etc).
                                  4~5stars = I plan to read the novel up to the end unless there's an unexpected development (i.e. author dropped, somehow it got worse(it's rare but it happens), or simply it went to a diverging path I didn't like).

                                  Sadly, most if not all my reviews of 3stars and below got deleted... Hence, I stopped using it.

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