I'm tired of these 10points reviews...

Any problems with the site? How can we improve KVR?
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murnau wrote:OP is right, Anyway, i don't read that crapy "reviews" section anymore, I couldn't care less.
Same. Kind of. :P Unless the reviewer's name is Aiyn Zahev or Sendy (or the likes).

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Reviews, for the most part, are utterly laughable. I detest reading magazine reviews (and certain blogs) as they are mostly just made up fake crap. People like their pulicity and free plugins.

There's a couple of youtubers I trust in fairness.

But I give my own reviews 30 out of 10, go me!
I will take the Lord's name in vain, whenever I want. Hail Satan! And his little goblins too. :lol:

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Well I don't read reviews here at kvr. I make all my decisions on the demos and don't care about a review. If I like it and can justify purchasing it I will. If I don't like it, or doesn't offer me anything new, I just erase it from my pc. I haven't read a music magazine for ages and I don't give much for most of their reviews either since they are biased. They don't want to give negative reviews to manufacturers who advertise in their magazines. You don't want to bite the hand that feeds you.

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I'm still trying to figure out why this is "site stuff" :shrug:

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Three reviews added this last week, and all are 10 out of 10.

And people say Computer Music is biased :hihi:

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There are various criteria, for instance absolute performance vs performance relative to price. If a bargain is as good as a €xxx-plugin, it would be kind of unfair to give them the same score.

But as someone else said, most people only write reviews if they are either seriously impressed or pissed by a product. That might explain the inverse Gauss distribution :hihi:

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sjm wrote:I don't mind the 10/10 ratings so much as the lack of info about the product and what the reviewer used it for. Context is everything.

What I want to know is why the reviewer likes it. What did they use it for? What does it do well? This lets me decide to what extent the review is relevant to me and by extension if I am interested in the product. A one line Twitter review provides no value to anyone.

I understand that people are much more likely to review the products they use a lot. And they are more likely to be using stuff they like a lot. So it stands to reason that reviews are going to be more positive.
I would like to bump this topic again given the unstoppable avalanche of twitter posts masquerading as reviews.

I find there is zero benefit to reviews similar to the following, which is a brief excerpt from the 10 most recent reviews:
  • "My workhorse. Period. One of the best if not most underrated FM synths out. There's so much potential if you spend a little time to get to know it."
  • "Does something good "magic" to the sound." (repeated about 20 times)
  • "Excellent free subtractive synth! Tens of thousands of presets you can find online. Will serve you well for years to come."
  • "Excellent free synth plugin! Grants you the ability to create awesome sounds. Would rate 10 if it were polyphonic, but its free. Can't complain to much..."
That's it. That's what people think constitutes a review. :roll: :roll: :? :cry: :help:

Unfortunately, this seems to be the norm these days. It's seldom someone actually bothers to write a real review. To me, that makes the review absolutely meaningless.

I'm not sure exactly what the best solution to this is. I can think of a few possibilities. But my primary desire would be for reviews to meet a certain minimum standard.

One possibility is to allow users to rate a plugin without needing to write a text. That would give those users who want to contribute their experience to the overall rating of a plugin the chance to do so without them being forced to write a text they can't be bothered to spend any time on. I know that the numeric ratings are largely meaningless, but at least the written reviews would no longer be cluttered up with garbage.

I am loathe to suggest a minimum review length, as that can be circumvented easily by copy pasting the same text, and some plugins are that simple that a short paragraph suffices.

I personally would like to see all the non-reviews purged and users who write a twitter post as a review given a warning that they are not following the review guidelines and that their ability to review plugins will be revoked if they continue posting what is essentially just spam. I appreciate however that this is probably a lot of work for the site moderators who have more important things to do.

What is particularly disappointing to me is that appealing to the user base to try and provide the community with useful content is simply ignored. You are not writing reviews to satisfy your own ego, you are writing them for the people who read them. If you post nothing of use or substance, you are wasting everybody's time, and that is disrespectful. Don't do that!

Anyway, I'm not sure there is a solution - maybe there is - but I would like to rant a little bit in the hope that some of you will take this on board and try and provide the rest of us with meaningful content.

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Right now I realized that I haven't read any of these so called reviews on KVR for nearly half a year... Have not missed anything...

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Numanoid wrote:Three reviews added this last week, and all are 10 out of 10.

And people say Computer Music is biased :hihi:
Haha, I was just about to comment on Computer Music. They are at least biased for a reason :)
i9-10900K | 128GB DDR4 | RTX 3090 | Arturia AudioFuse/KeyLab mkII/SparkLE | PreSonus ATOM/ATOM SQ | Studio One | Reason | Bitwig Studio | Reaper | Renoise | FL Studio | ~900 VSTs | 300+ REs

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starflakeprj wrote:
Numanoid wrote:Three reviews added this last week, and all are 10 out of 10.

And people say Computer Music is biased :hihi:
Haha, I was just about to comment on Computer Music. They are at least biased for a reason :)
Computer Music's reviews are 100% unbiased. Unlike other magazines, CM's editorial and advertising agendas are kept completely separate.

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Joe CM wrote:
starflakeprj wrote:
Numanoid wrote:Three reviews added this last week, and all are 10 out of 10.

And people say Computer Music is biased :hihi:
Haha, I was just about to comment on Computer Music. They are at least biased for a reason :)
Computer Music's reviews are 100% unbiased. Unlike other magazines, CM's editorial and advertising agendas are kept completely separate.
Then how come over 80 % (personally estimated) of your reviews are 8/10 or higher? Seems logically impossible to me. For instance, how can a reviewed software get 10/10 an still have cons?
i9-10900K | 128GB DDR4 | RTX 3090 | Arturia AudioFuse/KeyLab mkII/SparkLE | PreSonus ATOM/ATOM SQ | Studio One | Reason | Bitwig Studio | Reaper | Renoise | FL Studio | ~900 VSTs | 300+ REs

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The truth is, not many people bother reviewing bad products - they simply give it up. Personally I don't even try or buy things that I'm not sure if they're good.
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starflakeprj wrote:
Joe CM wrote:
starflakeprj wrote:
Numanoid wrote:Three reviews added this last week, and all are 10 out of 10.

And people say Computer Music is biased :hihi:
Haha, I was just about to comment on Computer Music. They are at least biased for a reason :)
Computer Music's reviews are 100% unbiased. Unlike other magazines, CM's editorial and advertising agendas are kept completely separate.
Then how come over 80 % (personally estimated) of your reviews are 8/10 or higher? Seems logically impossible to me. For instance, how can a reviewed software get 10/10 an still have cons?
As DJ Warmonger mentioned, we don't see the point in reviewing 'bad' products for the sake of it :)

And something worthy of a 10/10 could still have very minor issues that we feel deserve mentioning. For instance, a product in our latest issue has scored full marks, but its manual is a bit vague in places, and a couple of parameters are small and fiddly to use. It isn't enough to mark the product down, but we've flagged up those annoyances nonetheless.

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I have no big issue with CM reviews, even if the scores are a bit high. In this market, most of the time the score isn't really that important. It's the informational content of the review that matters. What is this thing? What does it do? What doesn't it do? How easy is it to use? That's what lets met decide whether it has a use to me personally.

CM reviews almost always answer these questions (maybe not the very short 2-3 paragraph reviews). 99% of the reviews on KVR over the last 5 years or so do not even get remotely close to answering these questions. "I like it, best freeware synth I download today" is useless. Some people like Abba. I don't. If someone who adores Abba tells me that a new band is absolutely amazing, I'm most likely not going to be particularly psyched to check them out. If someone with similar tastes in films tells me I should watch something, I'm much more likely to. Context is everything.

There was a time when the reviews on KVR were useful places to turn when you were interested in a particular plugin or type of plugin. Other users took time to share their experience and insights with others in a way that made the reviews relevant to the site. Meaningful reviews also help cut down on a lot of the fluff posts like "what's the best free reverb?"

At the moment, I can't see much point in having a review section any more, which is a real shame.

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Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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