Thursday Thoughts || Rating Systems

 It's time! Here's another Thursday Thoughts for all you little cuties! I'm currently in NYC and having the best time ever. In fact, I've taken tons of little clips (and plan on continuing to take more of those) so that I can make a FANTASTIC video-recap of my trip and all the exciting things I've done here in the city. So, look forward to that! But, being that I'm on vacation, I'm SUPER busy. So, please forgive me if this is a shorter post. Thursday Thoughts is a weekly, interactive, original meme here on my blog. Everyone with an opinion is invited to make their own post, link up and join the conversation! This week's topic of conversation is "Rating Systems." This particular topic was give to me by Carola. She's someone who regularly comments on my blog posts. I really appreciate that and I want to quickly thank you here. So, thanks for the idea!

Now, let's just get right into things! Rating systems are something that people have a lot of opinions and "disagreements" about. I personally do use the star rating system. When reviewing books or posting reviews on my Goodreads account which can be found in my sidebar I always give a rating out of 5 stars. I personally think that's not a horrible system. However, I can definitely understand why people wouldn't like it. The star rating system clearly has flaws. That's undeniable. I have a link on my blog to explain the way I define each rating out of 5 stars. I think, since there is so much confusion behind the whole rating thing, that this is something any and all bloggers who use the rating system should have on their blog. It's infinitely helpful to have that little bit of reference and insight when trying to understand the rating that someone decided to give a book.

Personally, I don't use any other rating systems. I think that the star rating system is the most universal of the rating systems. It's something that most people can kind of agree upon and I think that's really important. However, I don't think that ratings out of 10, for example, would be a problem. There's a reason that so many reviewers give ratings that include half stars. If the universal rating system were points out of 10, it would solve that problem. Even though, I don't really think that there's a major problem with the star rating system considering people do use half-stars.

My solutions in general would be to just communicate and to encourage communication among reviewers on this topic. If the meanings behind certain ratings were entirely universal there would be absolutely no problems with the star rating system. I may just be incredibly full of myself, but I think that the way I define my ratings (click HERE to see those definitions) is the way that everyone defines them. However, obviously I'm not oblivious enough to think that's the case. Nor, do I really think that's possible.

As long as a reviewer can elaborate in a review or even just a few sentences to explain a bit more in depth what they thought of a book, I think the star rating system does work well. Clearly, Goodreads could make some improvements in the way of making things more universal, but until then we should all just try to take everyone's opinions with a grain of salt. For example, someone might like a book just as much as you did and give it a different rating. Everyone's different and that's something that's honestly unavoidable.

Thanks for stopping by for this week's Thursday Thoughts! I would love to hear what you have to say! If you make a post of your own Thursday Thoughts, link it below!! If not, I would love it if you could comment and let me know your thoughts on rating systems. I currently have to run because we're about to go to Planet Hollywood for dinner followed by Newsies on Broadway! AHH! Talk to you guys next week when we discuss Reading Conditions! See ya then!