www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

Naysaying isn’t necessarily a form of edgelording. There is solace to be derived from the knowledge that other dissenters feel as you do.

xps

that Black Magick SS album is below a 3 now, lol

obviously a good thing to get the Nazi shit off the charts but it does remind me of something annoying about RYM, how sometimes a really good new album in an esoteric style will come out and the fans will jump all over it, then when it makes the charts it winds up getting downvoted by hundreds of people who never would've listened to it anyway. its a fate that's befallen a lot of my favorite albums of the last few years but it doesn't happen to Metal or VGM soundtracks because the general RYM userbase won't go there.

it happens with metal too. it just happened 2 or 3 weeks ago with Sweven who were topping that chart, only to be downvoted by the furious army of fans of the record that was second place by then

"it didn't matter if you liked them both, you had to pick one. you had to fight. in the great Oranssi/Ulcerate War of April 2020, you had to know which side you were on"

n.b. hoping fans of both those bands are much cooler than that obv

any time rym is mentioned on ilx is a dud

otm

any time rym is mentioned on ilx is a dud

fixed.

well then i'm a dud i guess! maybe i should stop going there. maybe i should stop going to youtube too. i haven't quit going to either site and i probably am not going to quit talking about either.

I haven't been there much recently but I have mostly good feelings about it. Didn't realize Pitchfork scores and downvoting was such a big deal.

But I am disappointed to know that people downvote stuff.

i mean i do think the site management are doing a pretty decent job with what they have to work with (constant influx of 4chan people, etc), navigating the social dynamics of brigade-driven culture is i think a valuable skill to learn

3.7 aggregate score

I think with some better algorithms/analysis RYM could gradually strip out all these artificial voting campaigns (both positive and negative), sock votes and troll votes so they don't have an effect anymore. Detect when an account gives hundreds of rap or metal or country releases a half star vote, just flag those accounts silently and don't include any of their votes in the ratings. Detect if a certain album receives a sudden mass influx of low votes, flag & exclude all those accounts too. I believe IMDB already does this, in this day and age of machine learning a site should be able to detect these patterns.

Harder to ban people for handing out 5 stars tbh but I'm all for targeting deliberate downrating. I'm sure it can be tricky to prove though

That's why I don't think bans or warnings are the way to go, you'll only get endless bad faith discussions about proof and evidence as if it's IRL - if the internet has proven anything, never ever engage seriously with trolls online. Just silently exclude all votes from these accounts. If joining a mass troll campaign against Fiona Apple also invalidates your 'serious' ratings, it'll stop quickly. Nobody likes spending time voting/rating into the void.

Nobody likes spending time voting/rating into the void.

you should see ilxor.com

All my terrible opinions from 19 years ago are still there for all to read, some void...

I think with some better algorithms/analysis RYM could gradually strip out all these artificial voting campaigns (both positive and negative), sock votes and troll votes so they don't have an effect anymore. Detect when an account gives hundreds of rap or metal or country releases a half star vote, just flag those accounts silently and don't include any of their votes in the ratings. Detect if a certain album receives a sudden mass influx of low votes, flag & exclude all those accounts too. I believe IMDB already does this, in this day and age of machine learning a site should be able to detect these patterns.

― Siegbran

my understanding is that rym does, in fact, do some variation on this (and may possibly have been doing this before imdb), but it's tricker to implement successfully than you're suggesting (see: the actual imdb rankings)

Oh absolutely I'm sure it isn't easy (esp not as it is happening) but the bigger the ratings dataset gets and the cheaper/standardized these ML tools get, it will get easier in time to clean up the db in retrospect. If there's a desire to do so at all - I mean RYM can also just let all this ratings gaming run wild and not care.

IMDB seems to get a bit better at cleaning up all the miraculous 10/10 ratings and glowing reviews for garbage low-budget/direct-to-streaming films.

Oh absolutely I'm sure it isn't easy (esp not as it is happening) but the bigger the ratings dataset gets and the cheaper/standardized these ML tools get, it will get easier in time to clean up the db in retrospect. If there's a desire to do so at all - I mean RYM can also just let all this ratings gaming run wild and not care.

― Siegbran, Monday, April 20, 2020 6:10 AM (nineteen minutes ago)

oh, sure they could, but they also do have a fairly heavy influx of users from 4chan.

shit gets _ugly_ there. there is a _lot_ of misogyny. some major releases, like norman fucking rockwell, have their shoutboxes deleted because people would go in and post some pretty disgusting misogynist shit and on a popular release like that it's very difficult to keep it moderated. personally i'm not a big fan of "shoutboxes" at all, too much like youtube comments sections. not sure why they were created, but possibly it was some sort of trade-off to try and reduce the number of shitpost/meme reviews - which they have been going through and doing. a lot of my older shitposty reviews have been "unpublished", which overall i think is a good thing in terms of the site direction.

the black magick ss thing is being pretty hotly debated among the mods and admins right now. honestly i'm pretty disappointed that anybody in that crew would be so naive as to argue that they're _not_ nazis, but as far as i can tell it's just one admin who keeps pushing the argument against the better judgement of pretty much everybody else there. we'll see how it turns out; these sort of arguments tend not to have compromise-based solutions.

i think there are a lot of good people on that site, a lot of good people running that site, but obviously they are facing certain challenges.

the fiona apple shoutbox has been tabula rasa'd - let's see if its second chance pays off

the fiona apple shoutbox has been tabula rasa'd - let's see if its second chance pays off

― when I come out, can you introduce me as Jagger (imago)

unfortunately there's not particularly a strong precedent for that sort of thing happening there :(

fwiw I think my experience of RYM is mostly positive b/c I don't really follow 'new music', as in stuff within the Pitchfork/Fantano/RYM chart sphere. I'm one of the guys who votes 25 albums in the year-end polls here and is astonished to see one of them make #68. the 'critically acclaimed' stuff I like with a ton of reviews/ratings tend to be older albums. so I think I'm shielded by the uglier side of the site. that said I do post on the forums every now and then and I definitely get the sense there are a lot of very active users in the 16-21 age range

lol the forums are a nightmare

btw can't hate on a site which produced this masterpiece

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/ELVISPRESLEYAEROSMITHFAN/led_zeppelins_physical_grafitti___40th_anniversary___1975_to_2015/

forums in general are nightmares

this is my favorite web board but it's just a bunch of us middle aged people who have known each other for probably decades now talking about stuff without being interrupted by 16 year old dudes who just discovered radiohead for the first time

i wish there was such a thing as long-term sustainable social spaces on the internet, i'm sad about all the friends i've lost to community collapse, but i guess there aren't long-term sustainable social spaces anywhere else either

Yeah the idea that you can build a large, stable, self-govering/moderating global social space is a dream that already died in the Usenet age.

xpost

The shoutboxes are a terrible idea. I never look a the forums, I can only imagine how bad they are.

Nazi content and pornographic cover art is already flagged and it makes sense for an archival-type site like RYM to extend the (up to now "experimental")

Descriptors

Granular controls to fine-tune your content filters for a new, more sensitive world.

JIMMY PAGE - WELL WE NEED OUR OWN TIMELESS MASTERPIECE

JOHN PAUL JONES - WHAT ? ? ! ! ? ? ! ! WE HAVE ALREADY MADE FIVE CLASSIC MASTERPIECE STUDIO ALBUMS ! ! ! ! !

ROBERT PLANT - LAUGHS HA HA THAT IS SO TRUE

JIMMY PAGE - TRUST ME THIS ALBUM IS GOING TO BE AMAZING

frogbs that is great !

That’s awesome, ha ha

ROBERT PLANT - LAUGHS HA HA HELL YES THE WOMEN LOVE ME WHEN IAM ON STAGE SINGING TO THEM WHOLE LOTTA LOVE

JIMMY PAGE - LAUGHS HA HA YES ROBERT HAS THE VOCALS AND THE CHARM TO SEND THE WOMEN INTO ORGASMIC PLEASURE IN CONCERT

JOHN PAUL JONES - WELL ENOUGH WITH THIS SEXY ROCK GOD TALK WE HAVE A LOT OF WORK TO TOMMORRY AND THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS

JIMMY PAGE - I AGREE WITH YOU JOHN THIS ALBUM IS GOING TO BE A HUGE CLASSIC I BELIVE SOMEDAY SOME GUY WILL BE MAKING A 40TH ANNIVERSARY LIST OF PHYSICAL GRAFITTI

imo this is the one guy who's allowed to have 95% of his ratings be 5s

Why did Fiona Apple suddenly end up on 4Chan's radar? I didn't realize she was still doing well.

Is it just 4Chan people doing this downvoting stuff? Has Vox Day became a singer and decided that he's more popular than Fiona Apple?

a girl got a 10 from Pitchfork, that's all you need to know

You never know with them. I don't understand why there's a ton of un-ironic Brie Larson worship on 4Chan.

RYM has Apple's album at 4.01 (Out of five) with 6 thousand some ratings. Seems like she's doing pretty well.

the fiona apple shoutbox has been tabula rasa'd - let's see if its second chance pays off

― when I come out, can you introduce me as Jagger (imago), Monday, April 20, 2020 6:52 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

looks like it's gone for good

it was dreadful, and f4ntano giving it 7/10 broke the floodgates for some reason. even without the shoutbox the negative reviews are making me want to like the album more. so i'll return to it soon lol

looks like the #1 album right now is the new black dresses,

this album is at #302 now, five days later btw

is that above or below the psychedelic nazis

Currently #926 so the algorithm works, sort of.

otoh sewerslvt at #26

mind you i haven't heard it because WHY THE HELL WOULD I PUT MYSELF THROUGH THAT?

I'm guessing there's a backstory to it? I heard the album context-free and thought it was pretty cool, but I won't be coming back to it. Not for any heart-shattering reasons, mind you.

Ok I just read an RYM review that explains it, and I… didn't hear any of that at all. Chalk one up for the school of thought according to which music is terrible at expressing specifics (cue Debussy titling his Preludes post hoc).

well i haven't heard it but some of the trans-related music i've heard has been very... high context. there's certain shared experiences a lot of trans people tend to have, experiences that cis people tend not to have. i've heard music referencing those shared experiences that i've found extremely powerful but which some other people, including other trans people, have found opaque or unclear.

I wonder how much of it would pass a blind test. Like, I'm utterly incapable of hearing Beethoven's Pastoral (the classic example) without visualizing frolicking sheep and the like, but I've never not been aware of its subtitle and its programmatic aims. Perhaps there's a real synergy in such instances, but it requires a key to be made thoroughly audible, a key that is usually of a verbal, explicative nature. I'll listen to the Sewerslvt again in light of what I now know about it.

Since it's completely unclear to me (a random dilettante who stays as far away from 4chan/trigger/troll/etc culture as I can) if Sewerslvt is some anonymous dude in a basement, an actual trans woman with real issues or an online group of pranksters laughing at our gullibility, I find it impossible to have any opinion on the artist/subject matter except scepticism. I can only judge it from a musical viewpoint, which is atmospheric D&B (which is something I'm into) made by a competent producer(s?), with on-the-nose depression/suicide samples. Taken at face value, I like it.