www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

I think it's like the proverbial sausage making - the individual raters all look like complete idiots, but somehow the sum of these ratings is surprisingly useful.
― Siegbran, vendredi 9 août 2019 20:21 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I feel it's the opposite for RYM. You can get around to the albums that appear in their charts through other means (publications etc), the jewels are all to be found on individual profiles and carefully crafted lists.
Completely agree about the random, joyless and disdainful impression I get from the rym "elitists". I don't want to be too harsh though, I did follow some of them for a while and it was still interesting.

I use RYM charts as a source for finding music from 1910s/1920s etc.

It's very useful before 1965, intermittently throws up good stuff until about 1990, just absolutely useless from then on.

This guy is good - https://rateyourmusic.com/list/bayard

One can amass a sizable quorum of "favorites" on RYM by simply scanning high ratings for more obscure albums one loves, checking that they've rated a sufficiently high threshold of releases with a sensible bell-curve of ratings, then then just ranking based on "friends".

Due to server/programming issues, ranking by "friends" was down for most of this year, and it cut back on my new music discoveries. It's now up, but still glacially slow, but I'd still take its output over most publications (save year end Quietus/Fact roundups).

Not RYM, but watching this Scaruffist adjust his ratings by .1 has a certain morbid fascination for me:
https://www.besteveralbums.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19621&start=130

I guess I shouldn't judge. I do sometimes go on RYM and adjust a rating by half a star. I feel like a fool, but I do it anyway.

To be clear with my story above, I wasnt trying to get down on people who do deep dive binges on RYM or anything like that. However you engage with music, if it brings you joy then more power to you. I was more relating it as the story of how I learned the lesson of: listen to music bc you want to, not bc you feel like you have to. I feel like RYM, with its data, cataloging, organization, and potentially-endless rabbitholes, had a seductive appeal to my friend and his personality type, but was a net negative for his emotional relationship with music - I think he ended up listening to music just in order to have something to rate & catalog rather than the other way around.

When I was a regular user, I got a lot of mileage out of the method sanpaku mentioned above, it was definitely my main way of finding out about new music in my wheelhouse and the hit-to-miss ratio was pretty reliable.

this person should be murdered

https://i.imgur.com/eyXx6I8.jpg

no really it's not necessary; the code to figure out ratings is almost certainly ignoring their ratings

I mean you're not wrong -- I'm not a fan of users with wacky rating systems, but I can generally shrug it off and remind myself that everyone engages with musical differently and that it's unreasonable to expect everyone's ratings to form a perfect bell curve

...but this guy literally only gives 5 stars to albums he's never listened to, despite the fact that he could use the wishlist function for the exact same purpose without mucking up the overall ratings. murder might be a little extreme, but I feel like he at least deserves the Barbara the Basin penalty

https://i.imgur.com/rpznGHr.jpg

I'm slightly alarmed that my own wishlist has 547 items on it. I don't even rate music anymore, I just wishlist shit that I'll probably never find the motivation to listen to

i appreciate people who game the system over at rym. fuck that site, honestly.

seriously no system is being "gamed" by schmucks who rate everything five stars, their ratings literally do not count

true, but it's possible that some weight is still given to users who rate 90% of their collection 5 stars (or 0.5 stars). the admins have always been a little vague about how wonky your ratings have to be before they totally de-weight your account

true, but it's possible that some weight is still given to users who rate 90% of their collection 5 stars (or 0.5 stars). the admins have always been a little vague about how wonky your ratings have to be before they totally de-weight your account

― hoostanbank de reason lyrics mp4 hd video download (unregistered)

yeah i'm not a big fan of the lack of transparency (having seen how it works out for, say, youtube), though i can understand why they're vague about it - tell people exactly how the system works and you're telling them how to game it

end of the day is that whatever they're doing with their ranking system i find it useful, particularly if i do genre filtering (i like a lot of metal but if i'm going to look for any sort of new music on RYM the first thing I do is filter out all metal, unless that's what I'm specifically looking for)

just today i said to myself "i would like to hear some more acid house" so just did an "everything" genre top chart and listened to the top rated stuff that wasn't by 808 state

i might do better on discogs but i've never been able to figure out how to get useful information out of them, the mercantile focus of that site incentivizes people to just fucking rate everything a 5

fuck that site, honestly.

Why is it so bad and hated?

the writing is awful, the ratings are nonsensical and determined by horrible nerds, etc.

though i just read this review on the page for deftones' diamond eyes and it's the best description of a deftones album i've ever read

The soundtrack to falling in love at the bdsm party

I don't read the reviews and there can be no doubt that its denizens are horrible nerds for the most part but I wouldn't go so far as to call its ratings nonsensical and custom lists can be quite useful for exploring a given subgenre. All in all, I'd rather have it than not.

the lists can be good i agree

idk i just find that the ratings tend to either reinforce received wisdom or punish a record for arbitrary reasons, particularly wrt new releases, which is why i can't get annoyed at all at someone giving 5-star ratings for cataloguing purposes

it's kind of a depressing place imo. certain genres that are not prog suffer a lot bc of the given user base. just kind of a shitty corner of the music internet brazenly indulging in its shittiness. i'm of course there all the time bc when i fall in love with an artist/record i find myself seeking some conversation about it even if the conversation sucks lol

i have no problem saying 'fuck rym (the community)' while still finding the site's functionality pretty useful

they're even terrible about genre categorisation occasionally, recently had people insist to me that the new shura album was a synthpop album (because her last one was i guess?) and not r&b of any sort

That's fair, Brad. I guess my expectations are exceedingly low anyway so I'm likelier to focus on what works.

in many cases the ratings can be useful to get a basic overview of what the most well-received albums by some artist are etc. but for a lot of genres (nearly all pop, r&b that isn't one of a few canonised neo-soul artists or dates from before indie critics started taking it more seriously this decade, a lot of rap that's either too street or too pop for them, etc.) they're completely useless because everything is hovering at around 2.90 because barely anyone has engaged with much of it in good faith

It's terrible when it comes to classical as well but I've learned to just accept its shortcomings and use it only to delve into certain genres.

just kind of a shitty corner of the music internet brazenly indulging in its shittiness

new board description!

I use rym sifting through stuff, the searchability of the database is a plus imo. And I do look at lists, but mostly when it comes to niche or nichest-niche microgenre sorting desires.

I unironically love all the weird niche lists like "Wisconsin Artists with Unnecessary Repeating Letters in Their Names"

The soundtrack to falling in love at the bdsm party

― american bradass (BradNelson)

off-topic, this is sort of my worst nightmare and the key reason i've always avoided bdsm parties

the writing is awful, the ratings are nonsensical and determined by horrible nerds, etc.

― american bradass (BradNelson)

ah shit you've hit a sore spot for me, i am kind of a horrible nerd? if we're talking about the sort of people that whiney likes to attribute all the evils in the world to on a regular basis (sorry for bringing you into the conversation whiney you've just done it enough that it bugs the shit out of me on a long-term basis)

when i started using the site i was a crappy music critic and a shitty know-it-all with a chip on my shoulder against "professional critics" and an unhealthy obsession with progressive rock, and the site was totally perfect for me at that time.

i feel like the site has changed along with me. maybe i haven't changed that much, maybe the site hasn't changed that much. i haven't written a review there in months, but i like it, i'm fond of it, i'm glad it's there.

rusho i am def not talking about you. maybe former you if you were a know-it-all, website is still lousy with empty lazy dismissals of music that the users haven’t engaged with or are clueless about which is not a pattern of behavior i associate with you

there are many good users though, for example JAMOOL

I have had great success in finding new (to me), good music in genre charts.

Jangle Rock/Pop,
Art Rock/Pop,
Prog Rock/Pop, Jazz Rock/Pop,
Prog Rock/Pop,
Experimental Rock/Pop,
Noise Rock/Pop,
Lo-Fi Indie,
Post-Punk,
Power Pop,
...

A broader question one might ask is: what's the ideal ground upon which to build a genre-specific canon? 'Aggregating individual scores dished out by a legion of horrible online nerds' isn't the worst way of going about it tbh, if this exercise is to be maintained at all. Unless other websites are conspicuously better at it, in which case please point the way!

If I felt like I hated people or cliques pushing their music taste as "the one and only" I would order the intrusiveness as follows: P4K>ILM>RYM

brad summed it up pretty well why i dislike it so, but i will add one more thing: the stinginess of the ratings really does bug me. the fact that there are admins monitoring users and deeming their ratings inadmissible is just stupid. it's like the whole place is a ratings police curating and reinforcing the same old bullshit that's been forced on music fans since the advent of the "music critic" and i hate it so very much.

and besides, it's usually just the same things getting the same kind of ratings as any other outlets. it's worse there though because it's especially groupthink-y and obnoxious.

going to start an "irrantionally angry: ilm edition" topic now lol

last I checked ILM has plenty of group-thinky polls. the difference with rym is that you can click on the results to quickly get more info on an album before you decide whether or not you want to listen to it: emotional descriptors, additional genres the album falls into, etc...

nobody's contributions are ever deemed inadmissible on ilm.

imo, a great music critic isn't better than a conglomerate user score. they're both going to be terribly subjective but at least a conglomerate site has quicker navigation.

quicker navigation can get fucked, i reckon. musical cliff's notes suck.

plus I don't like to read things by people trying to explain why something is subjectively good

you might like that kind of shit but I don't

what

I don't like to read things by people trying to explain why something is subjectively good

board description

music criticism doesn't get any better by finding different critics. it is still music criticism

Can't get into this site at all. However, the 'Best of Rate Your Music' page on Twitter is pretty funny. So I guess I'm conflicted.

rym is an indispensable tool for the pan-genre maven

if all of those genres have the word "rock" in them

it's good for hip-hop and pop too

there's definitely an r&b blind spot

it's good for a certain kind of hip-hop. i swear we've been over this.

I don't like to read things by people trying to explain why something is subjectively good

board description

― jmm, Tuesday, September 10, 2019 5:58 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

for De Subjectivisten!

there isn't a single trap album with a rating higher than 4

death grips' the money store is not better than every trap album ever made, im sorry.