100th review on Rating. Review on Rating Reviews on MouthShut

I am happy to write the 100th review of this topic

Rating Reviews

The most important feature of Mouthshut is Rating reviews. It is a great concept, which pulls us to write reviews with so much effort on products/services to get our review, rated as “Very useful”. There is no meaning in writing reviews if the review is not rated. It is a sign of acceptance of our opinions about the product by the others. The site defines this feature as “When you finish reading a review, you will find a panel(as shown below) at the bottom of the page, asking you to rate this review. Choose the option that best reflects what you think about this review. Let others know how you feel about the review they have written by rating it fairly. “ I think this explanation is so ambiguous or not clear rather and lead to lot of confusions among the readers to set the criteria for rating reviews as Very useful or useful or somewhat useful or not useful.

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Why a review should be rated?

• Cousin2, the star writer of Mouthshut always leaves an advice to the fresher, “Plz read and rate other review because MS gets money when a review is rated and it is impossible to run MS without money”.

  
  




• It is a sign of acceptance or denial of one’s opinion about the product and overall rating of a review is the overall measure of acceptance.

  
  




• When you rate a review you get 1 MS point and when your review is rated you will get 2 MS points so to increase your MS points you should rate other reviews and also should write review to acquire more MS points by getting your review rated by others.

  
  




• A review becomes a hot review based on the number of ratings of the review

  
  




• A reviewer becomes a star writer based on his MS points in which almost 70% of the points are acquired from rating reviews.

  
  

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My criterions for rating reviews

*If you want me rate your review as Very Useful

Do’s*

-  Try to give opinions and details about all necessary features of the product/service.

-  It is enough if the review convey your opinions in simple English

-  Try to write the review with readable formatting and presentation. Some of them(fresher mostly) write the whole review in a single paragraph which is not pleasant to look and read, however good may be the content.

• When I agree with your opinions about the product/service

Need not’s(please not: I didn’t say “don’ts”)

• Try to avoid too much technical details about the product/service, which cannot be understood by non-technical readers

  
  




• Need not have innovative presentation and creative writing style

  
  




• No size limit. I would rate even a review with just 150 words as Very Useful if it satisfies the criterions mentioned above in “Do’s”. And also I would rate a review with 8000 words and even more as Useful/somewhat useful if it doesn’t satisfy the criterions mentioned in “Do’s”.

  
  




• Need not be hilarious

  
  




• It is not necessary to show your expertise in Vocabulary and professionalism in writing here to get it rated as VU because everyone should understand your content clearly.

  
  

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I rate the review as “Useful”

• When its content lacks in information that is required

  
  




• When I disagree with some of his opinions

  
  

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I rate review as “Somewhat useful”

• At the minimum I rate a review as SWU if his opinions completely differs from mine

  
  




• When the English is too poor so that it makes the content ambiguous(rarely happens)

  
  




• When the review has very less information to help the reader

  
  

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I rate a review as “Not useful”

• I rarely rate reviews as “Not useful”. So far I have rated only two reviews as “NU”.

When I won’t rate a review

• When wrong topic chosen for the review

  
  




• When the review is not original(Copied and pasted from somewhere)

  
  

Mostly the freshers do such mistakes as they may be unaware of all the features of the site and so I will direct them to drop the review in the proper topic and also “Not to copy from sites and to be original” through an M2M or in Comments section. But if a well known writer of the site does like that there is no other option you have to rate it as “NU”(probably no such writers do like that).

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But all the need not’s I have mentioned for “VU” above should be there if you need to drag in more comments. But the problem is most of the members in MS consider these additional qualities of the review as the basic quality or the criteria to rate a review as VU. I too encourage such professional reviews, hilarious reviews, reviews with unique style of writing, creative and innovative reviews but my encouragement will be through the Comments and not through rating.

As some of them look up for these additional quality of writing in a review sometimes they rate a review as Useful which satisfies all the “Do’s” required by me(for not having presented the stuffs with professionalism and creativity in writing and also with a high quality of vocabulary) and which deserves to get a VU rating as per my norms.

Firstly one should understand the basic purpose of the rating. It is to show how truthful and original and trustworthy are the opinions written about the product/service by the member. If it does, the review can be rated as VU without any second thought. But if your rating is based on those “Need not’s” it leads to lot of confusion whether to believe the content in the review or not(even the content may be correct and opinion sync with your opinions). So a rating should be purely based on the how well the opinions and details furnished by the writer matches with yours and nothing else should be considered.

So to avoid all these confusions and ambiguity about the Rating

Last week I read a review in which one of the members advised to change the options as

*Completely agree

Agree

Somewhat agree

Don’t agree*

I too suggest the same

These options will make the Rating more perfect.