www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

It still looks pretty awful on mobile.

oh cool, it's back. guess they listened

Where? In the 'my new releases' section I'm still only seeing like two upcoming releases.

Oh, ignore me. It's in it's usual place. Would be nice if they integrate the two though.

*its...

Not only is RYM woefully lacking in the classical department (loads of missing releases + extra gatekeeping before you can add them yourself – basically a full time job), it’s in the throes of a tiny cabal of pseudo enthusiasts who rate everything between 0.5 and 1.5 and I can’t imagine a more joyless, detestable bunch (their overall taste is usually shit, to boot, as their precious few 4.5s tend to demonstrate).

I was listening to Younghi Pagh-Paan’s Silken Thread (Wergo, 2020) last night and thinking about what a stupidly underrated composer she is and how much I enjoy this particular album, only to check, out of idle curiosity, whether it had been added to the database. Sure enough, the usual suspects slapped a 1 and a 0.5 on it, respectively, and I just can’t imagine keeping up one’s edgelord act for this long.

It’s also trivially easy to correct for, RYM can just silently drop all ratings from people who rate 3000+ albums.

Yeah the different cabals out to ruin most genres are obnoxious, see basically any mainstream pop record too. Not sure I agree with Siegbran's fix though, I mean I myself have more than 3,000 records in my collection and all rated. I'd hate to lose those.

I mean, don't get me wrong. That site is filled with awful people and I'm very happy that I've never even set foot into the forums over there. But I long ago started tracking my collection there and I find it useful for that.

the site does deweight negative ratings from people who give a lot of negative ratings

those classical edgelords need to be uh yeeted into the sun (i believe that's the au courant terminology) tho

Modern Icaruses, truly.

whereas i tend to give positive ratings, so if i rate something low, it fucking means something

looking at you, cigarettes after sex, the worst band in the world

I’m pretty much the same. I don’t actively seek out music I’m unlikely to enjoy so most of my negative ratings are for hyped releases I want to dis numerically (‘cause I can’t help but check some of them out) and disappointments. I also only recently resumed rating stuff after deleting all of my stars a while back so the overall grading scheme skews even more heavily than usual toward the upper end, since I started by re-adding almost every single 4.0+ album I can think of. A couple of years should correct that tendency, though.

I don’t actively seek out music I’m unlikely to enjoy

yeah i put my time in on RYM and one of the main life lessons i learned was that its pretty easy to avoid hearing a lot of music that you hate. anyone with a significant amount of 1 or .5 ratings is automatically suspect imo. i also made a point to not rate anything without posting a review as well, so a lot of stuff that i didnt have a coherent opinion on other than realizing right away that i hated it or it was Not For Me, i wouldnt bother rating it, just move on, so after thousands of ratings i feel like i probably had vanishingly small amounts of 1s and .5s.

Yeah, that’s a solid policy. I only rate something 3.0+ if I’ve heard it at least twice. For lower ratings, life’s just too short, so I don’t bother giving them another spin in most cases, unless it very clearly feels like I’m missing something essential that I could grasp some day.

For instance, if we stick to last year’s chart toppers, I generally like Fiona Apple and clipping. so I felt the need to hear their latest at least twice before giving them a middling rating but I don’t care enough for Lianne La Havas’s blandcore to revise my opinion.

Lianne La Havas’s blandcore

this marks the official opening of EOY hostilities and I am so here for it

I’m sad to report that I’ll be sitting out this year’s main ILM poll so you can expect the rollout’s positivity quotient to shoot up by at least 200%.

i have some bugbears, possibly

la havas is great imo, clipping was equally enjoyable. i can't handle fiona apple for some reason.

La Havas and Apple are both easy to like, it's Clipping I can't seem to handle.
For all the dud responses, it seems a lot of ILXors have an account on RYM. A list would be nice. That way we can generate a Top of the year and also cancel all the polls.

My EOY picks (still in progress for a couple of more weeks):

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/pomenitul/2020-highlights-in-progress/

xp haha. Like some others here, I just use it as a listening log. For that: Classic. Only when the poll here comes around do I really look back, re-listen to more things and try to sort it all out. I don't treat rating seriously (that would mean multiple listens before I've "logged" anything). If I just make it to the end of an album it's getting at least a 3. I've got many 4's to sort out for the poll.

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/o_nate/best-music-of-2020/

still in progress

Am I just a bit slow catching up with a recent design tweak? Quite like it. (As someone who predominantly uses it for search I've been screaming for a larger search box for ages.)

It came into effect like 3h ago, so not slow at all! I quite like it too.

I figured it must have been fairly new but one can never be sure...

looks nice but uh...how do you edit your reviews now?

Hmmm… looks like that's no longer an option.

good to see it's not just me

I know shitpost-style reviews would get unpublished and you'd be barred from trying to review that album again, I figured maybe they thought my reviews were so good that they didn't want me to ever change them

Ratings as of this writing: 73,041

How.

https://rateyourmusic.com/~Vivnm

I think by clicking on those little stars

The 'dominant rym userbase' is difficult to define, from my perspective there's not a group of popular core users like there was 10 years ago, now it feels like a more much bigger fragmented userbase in its place. In that time it has felt like has been a shift towards more 4chan/reddit users but you could argue that that is generally true of discussing music anywhere on the internet (except here?!). The shoutboxes were a nice idea imo and on the less popular releases they're actually home to some reasonable chat, it's obviously much worse on the popular/hyped releases.

I agree it's awful for classical music and there's a lot of electronic music missing still (but has gotten much better). The amount of users following hip hop on there has improved massively, thankfully it's not just me and 2 other users adding regional rap and everyone else listening to boom bap anymore.

I barely interact with the main userbase, the improvements the site has made over the last 5 years or so has meant that I can just rely on following artists/labels and users I have some commonality with, which is brilliant because I don't have to work so hard to keep up with everything I'm interested in.

They should ditch the Sonemic idea.

I barely interact with the main userbase, the improvements the site has made over the last 5 years or so has meant that I can just rely on following artists/labels and users I have some commonality with, which is brilliant because I don't have to work so hard to keep up with everything I'm interested in.

This is exactly how I approach it and why RYM is totally classic.

Not a big fan of recent design change. Search engine doesn't seem to work as well and dropped filters etc in the process. So now instead of having to/being able to select all releases or whatever it now seems to just search everything from what you've entered and then list them in categories. Not sure if it lists as much.
Seems like a bit of a backward step. Is it an improvement at all?

You can still filter, just click on the empty search bar and there's a downwards arrow next where it says everything with your categories

Not being careful with film spoiler tags can get you banned, according to rules! Some sites would benefit from a heavy hand but this is a bit weird.

Okay, this review of the new Hold Steady record was great, even as someone who generally likes THS:

Sounds like a boomer doing slam poetry in an elevator. Kinda cringe but instrumentation is ok for elevator rock I guess. Think I will forget about this album in a week.

Did someone say there is a penalty for writing too many 5 star reviews because I've been meaning to get back on but I mostly want to review my favorite stuff which will be mostly 5 stars

aiui— not a penalty penalty, but they stop factoring your scores into the overall average. works the same way for 1 star ratings, iirc.

another reason rym is stupid.

and i tried this past summer. fuck me, did i try. but i just don't have the patience for it.

*too many 1 star ratings

but what's "too many" — no idea.

it could also just be an internet folklore thing that has no truth behind it and every one of those kanye west things i rated one half star actually matters.

how the algorithm works is not exactly known, which I think is intentional because for some reason people really love to try to game it. I've been wondering about this myself since 90% of my ratings are 3.0+. I don't really spend much time with albums I don't like and I don't find a whole lot of albums irredeemable. But I think the "deweighting" applies more to the people who slap .5's on like 10,000 different albums. I haven't seen your profile (are YOU on the ILXors on RYM list?) but I suspect you probably don't have anything to worry about.

how the algorithm works is not exactly known, which I think is intentional because for some reason people really love to try to game it.

the modern world in a nutshell.

(goes to vote all pixies releases one half star)

are YOU on the ILXors on RYM list?

― frogbs, Wednesday, January 12, 2022 10:17 PM (one hour ago)

I didn't know there was one, so probably not. I've barely been active there in several years

well, what's your account

https://rateyourmusic.com/~iamragmar

thanks. I think the plan was to do a custom chart amongst those users and maybe poll the top 25 or something. ILX's favorite albums and what not. but I think I need a few more users.

though I suspect your profile may not affect much :)