What's your checklist for giving specific rating to a story?

[GlassRose]

5: I love

4: Good, some flaws technically or smth

1: How fucking dare you (Fuck you Rupegia it's been years and I am still tilted)

N/A: Everything else, or I just haven't bothered

 

[theInmara]

Have I read it? 5

Am I reading it? 5

Have I stopped reading it? no-rating

Have I failed to start reading it? no-rating

Ratings suck and don't really tell anybody anything except the fraction of an opinion of one limited reader, and 1-4 are mean spirited and hurtful.

 

[BlissyMKW]

The same exact ratings I have when it comes to giving games certain ratings, barring the added restriction that I only give ratings to completed works.

5 stars is "fantastic, would totally recommend." Even if it has issues, they're not big enough to heavily change my opinion.

4 stars is "I like it." Not strongly enough to reach 5, but still a generally solid product.

3 is the in between route between like and dislike. A lot of things will likely fall into this area.

2 stars is "I didn't like it very much." The reasons can vary, but they're not totally awful.

1 star is reserved for the bottom of the barrel, borderline garbage that I wouldn't even suggest to my worst enemies.

 

[beast_regards]

5 or bust, normally.

I have enough of this Royal Road nonsense, especially when we aren't on the Royal Road ....

Back on the Royal Road, before I was forced to leave, I wrote more than a hundred reviews and they ONLY MADE THINGS WORSE! (even the 5-stars!!!!)

Here, so far, I managed to make 5 reviews here - two had five star ratings, two had no ratings because it didn't save properly, and one 3 star. If I gave an anonymous rating, they are always five.

That 3-star was done in retaliation as someone pulled the Royal Road on me, so I gave what I received, but thought better of it later so it's now 4.

If the Royal Road and their sugar daddy Amazon taught me anything, the five star rating scale are completely useless metric, not indicative of the actual quality of the story, product or service, used only for marketing, and to wage the Internet rating wars with all the drama attached. Their very existence only makes things worse. If they are genuine, they only reflect on two things: A mood of the reviewer at the time of writing, and the measure of their self control. Hence the 3. I was pissed off, and gave 3, nothing more, nothing less, and then improved it to 4 as symbol of my disdain for the Amazon's Royal Road and their idiotic rating system.

 

[Alski]

1. Spelling
2. Grammar
3. Story
4. Pacing
5. Personal enjoyment

I take all of these and rate them on a scale of 1-5, add the totals together, and divide by 5 to decide the rating.

I wish there was more copies of you about rating stories, others cant be trusted.

 

[fcures]

1. The writing was terrible.
2. Not bad perhaps might read a lil before getting bored and dropping.
3. Actually decent and might even anticipate next chapter.
4. This author is insanely good.
5. Perfect, I want a sequel or more works from this author.

 

[ThrillingHuman]

5 - good story
4 - good story, has technical flaws that can be overlooked
3 - was good, went downhill
2 - I would generally drop it and not rate it
1 - You piece of shit why did you put X (ntr, harem, romance, furry, anything I don't like) in the story without any warning?! You actively lied about your story! Fuck you.

 

[Arkus86]

I do not have an absolute checklist, my rating can be influenced by my personal enjoyment, accuracy of tags might take a star down (outright missing tags/content warnings, or tags with nothing to show for them for a long time) and I also noticed I might be more generous with short stories, but the following is the general guideline:

1 - Literary trash level.

2 - If your story has at least something going for it, even if it is generally bad, it will not get a 1-star.

3 is for mediocre books, not great, not terrible. The grammar is poor, the writing style might be awkward, but it is readable and enjoyable. Or the story might leave things to be desired, but makes up for it in good grammar and flows nicely without too obvious issues. Or a really good story, but with major flaw or flaws. You get the idea.

4 are great stories with only some minor flaws. Good grammar is a must.

5 - Story, flow, characters, style... this book has it all, and very few issues to point out, if any.

Most of the books I do rate end up either 3 or 4. A plenty of the books I check out, however, I do not rate at all, because I'm undecided or they're not what I'm looking for.
A 1-star, I might have given two times over all the stories I have read over the years, on both SH an NU combined. One was hard wish fulfillment, no decent comedy, no suspsense, not even slice of life, inconsistent to the next level with incredibly dense MC and the characters could not be more flat if you tried. The other, I don't even know what it was about, as I only barely recognized the language as an attempt at English.

Unfortunately, it feels as if most people rate a story as either 5-star or nothing at all, and so you get a practical result of ratings where 4.5-5 is good to great, 4-4.5 is anything from "somewhat alright" to good, and basically everything under 4 starts is generally bad - as long as there is a decent number of ratings to begin with.

 

[Representing_Tromba]

I wish there was more copies of you about rating stories, others cant be trusted.

I thought more people did it this way buy I guess not.

 

[Corty]

I only rate stories as 5-stars. I don't read anything that would rank below 3. And others will ruin the rating anyway for some bullshit reason, so I will encourage anybody with a 5-star to help balance it out.

 

[packbat]

We don't rate stories unless we give them a fair trial, and we don't stick with a story unless there's something to keep us in it, so yeah - we're not helping with the rating inflation issue.

...but, if we do end up rating a story, we're basically asking ourselves "does this fall short of 5 stars?" A five-star story has strong positives - there's things we really like about it - and is free of major negatives - things that seriously bother us about it.

So, of the ratings we've given in practice:

- 5 stars = we like it without reservation
- 4 stars = we like it despite its issues
- 3 stars = we see the appeal but it's not very good or we wanna really like it but we have serious issues with it

A 2 star rating would probably either have much more serious issues or just be awful, a 1 star rating would be actively toxic. But we don't read awful or toxic stories.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

A 2 star rating would probably either have much more serious issues or just be awful, a 1 star rating would be actively toxic. But we don't read awful or toxic stories.

Yeah, if I suspect that I would give a story less than three stars, I will probably stop before I finish the first, or definitely before completing the second chapter, unless I promised to read the whole thing or was being held at gun point (and the latter situation would probably remove a star from consideration on its own...)

 

[miyoga]

1: It's either unreadable or written by @K5Rakitan
2: I could read some of it, but I felt dumber the further I went
3: Meh. It was readable, but that's about all it was.
4: I got into it, but found a couple things that made me question the story.
5: I really liked it, actively checked for updates and probably interacted with you (the author) or other readers in comments.

Honestly though, if it's going to get a 1 or a 2, it's getting dropped instead. I don't typically do ratings, though, so if you see me commenting or reading multiple stories from the same person, then you've got a pretty strong indicator that their at least half decent writers.

 

[EdoKant]

Personally, the characters, worldbuilding, and plot are most important to me when rating a story. I've never given a 1 star since I don't want to demotivate other writers. If I really don't like something that much, I'll just move on to the next story.