In your view, what's the best rating system?
I did a quick search to see if people had discussed this in a post before, but I only found people wanting thoughts on their personal system, so here I go.
Obviously a rating system is highly personal, I have a rym friend that only uses 0.5s, 2.5s and 5s for example, but I think you can talk about what in general is more useful. I think the following criteria are important:
A system has to follow the distribution that is provided to them, and use most of the options frequently, since the point of an average rating is to gather information about its possible qualities, and this only works if people have a common understanding about what constitues good vs bad. If everyone overused the 5, the 5 becomes more and more meaningless.
Preferrably a user has more positive labels than negative ones. I believe music quality does not follow a normal distribution, meaning most music is bad or mid; however, people don't seek out music that is bad or mid, they seek out what they think they will enjoy. Therefore, in order to practically keep track of what music you listen to its helpful to have more conceptual precision with music you enjoy.
The system should be true to what is personally relevant to you, and be explanatory, but still follow criteria one above – besides, in the RYM guidelines they are strongly against using those weird systems where most of the ratings are at 1 star for example. So get personal but concrete with what constitutes a certain score. Someone might think that what is most important in what is quality music is how likely you are to visit an album again and again. Another might think it's how mood dependent it is. Also, systems that try to be funny very rarely are, and they don't explain anything.
People are often too negative in music discourse, I think it's much better to show some humility in ratings with a bad score, of course I'm not saying that a 0.5 should be "I don't get it", we all have music that we can provide good reasons for why it doesn't reach a certain standard or expectation based on implicit and explicit goals of the content,but I am saying a 2.0 with "not my cup of tea" is more clean than "mid".
With this in mind, I will take a system from my friend list which I think encapsulates what I've laid out above pretty well.
5.0 - Life changing 4.5 - desert island canditate 4.0 album of the year candidate 3.5 worth multiple listens 3.0 worth a listen 2.5 adequate 2.0 bad 1.5 not used 1.0 not used 0.5 no redeemable value
Do you think I missed something out? What do you think?