Review Length in Site Activities

[abhorsen.]

We'll be posting a longer survey after the FROGS are over, but since this could potentially have a broad impact on site activities, we wanted to post it here, too.

The staff have been talking on and off for the past couple months about reviewing culture here and how the default has come to be long, detailed reviews rather than shorter ones, and how some of us on the team have personally found that we review less because we feel the pressure to leave long ones when we do. We know that character counts for some site activities contributes to that, and we're wondering how you feel about that going forward.

(Please keep other feedback about review events for the survey; we care about your perspectives on those, too, but right now we're really looking for opinions about this specifically.)

The poll will close and the thread will lock on March 22, so please get your thoughts in before that! Thank you!

[grumpy cat]

ahh i feel responsible for this  the results of my twitter poll made me a lil' sad when i realised that most fics that do get read and reviewed were only for hc events/swaps and such. and i agree with the feeling that the fact we kinda normalise long reviews to be the standard and "better" than smol ones contributed to that.

i voted for 250 character minimum, only for house cup events because:

• it's a smol minimum and if we continue with awarding points for average review length in reviewing events, it'll probably balance itself out (and ultimately, i think our goal is for people to read the stories...not write essays on them?)
• i voted only for house cup events because i think that we should promote reading and letting the author know you've read something you liked in any way - be that with a smol review, a long one or by 'liking' a story - i see all of those as valid feedback and personally, i love anything that the person who reads my story has the time/capacity to do - even if it's dm'ing me to let me know they liked something i wrote

[abhorsen.]

1 minute ago, grumpy cat said:

ahh i feel responsible for this 

in the best possible way

[Aphoride]

I just wanted to say that I really liked the staggered points/worth of longer reviews v shorter reviews, so that there was an acknowledgement of longer reviews (and longer stories which got reviewed, too) in this event. It worked really well, imo, and I liked that it gave people a choice as to whether they wanted to write longer or shorter, depending on what they felt would work better for them and considered both opinions as equally valid  

[just.a.willow.tree]

I do feel a pressure to leave longer reviews, and while I don't plan on entirely discontinuing that (especially if I have lots of things to say ), I do think it would be interesting if the site's review culture shifted to slightly shorter reviews? As it is right now, I feel really guilty when I leave a review on the shorter side, and I feel really self-conscious about my review count, and whether or not it deserves to grow if I leave shorter reviews.

I voted for 500 characters, only for HC activities -- it's easier to leave a 500-character review, especially in comparison to the giant ones that people often leave, and it feels a little less stressful that way. Outside of events for HC points, I think people should be able to leave reviews at any length. I think there's the impression that longer reviews are better in quality than shorter reviews (I am also guilty of this), but recently I've reread some wonderful, sweet reviews that definitely weren't meeting the 750-character standard, but that sparked as much joy as any other. 

Overall, I think it makes sense to have a limit for HC events, but if other non-HC sitewide events took place, it would amazing to see a normalization of shorter reviews!

[tgfoy]

From my experience as an Author on the site one of the off putting/discouraging things to me is the number of people who review during such events, but stop the moment the event is over. Some way of encouraging reviewing at other times might encourage more and Authors. I am not worried about the length of reviews, so long as they are constructive.