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← darkroom
Lower Review Character Requirement
I just finished writing up a review for a manga I read only to find that I'm apparently short 700 characters?? I understand having a minimum requirement in place to prevent low effort reviews, but having too high of a requirement can stop people from posting valid reviews. I don't want to fill my review with random stuff just to satisfy an arbitrary requirement when I've already said all I had to say about the manga. I'd appreciate it if you could take this into consideration, thank you.
Reviews are often too short and low quality, lowering the current minimum characters would only make the situation worse. If you don't know what to say about a work, then you should probably avoid reviewing it in the first place. As others suggested, either post in the forum about it or write your opinion on your page.
I suppose so. The idea of "too short" strikes me as pretty subjective since some people value conciseness (or would even prefer a short review instead of no review), but if that's how a majority of the site feels, then oh well.
I always know what I want to say whenever I want to write a review.
And it's NEVER 2200 characters, and yet NEVER "low quality".
I can't comprehend how anybody can really need 2200 characters unless they are reviewing a masterpiece.
But unfortunately 3/4 of the stuff out there is barely mediocre.Reviews are not a place to logorrheically show off one's otaku knowledge, they are meant to effectively give an idea of why you liked/disliked something, and length is NOT a measure of effectiveness.
I agree that too short review are often unhelpful, but too long ones are imo worse.
I find that 1200-1400 minimum characters would be more effective.
Then you can post it as a status or write it as a list note.
Why are you suggesting I write a personal note instead of a review, when they have two completely distinct purposes?
I simply feel that 2200 characters is not only an extreme overkill to simply filter out unhelpful "it sucks / it's amazing", but it's actually even counterproductive.
Like I explained in another comment, tastes are subjective, therefore reading one review is rarely useful. Reading many reviews is still not an objective way to determine if you might like a story, but it's statistically more effective than reading one.
A minimum of 2200 characters draws a hard line that completely cuts off a LOT of people who have very interesting AND helpful things to say that don't need 2200 characters (and that won't fit in a micro review), and people who have a more concise style of communication and can't/won't write long, and it tips the scale towards a specific kind of reviews that I described as logorrheic and that are rarely helpful.
The result? Less people who write and who read reviews, = LESS helpful.I myself have extensive professional training and experience in dramaturgy and storytelling, and on top of that I watched/read more titles (comics, animations, movies, series, books, novels etc) than the average person would be able to in a dozen lives, and regarding manga/hua/hwa and anime I am deeply knowledgeable in the isekai and regression genres (arguably not a synonym of quality but it's my personal escapist sin after a long day of hard work) and also murim.
I am very confident that there is a lot I can say in much less than 2200 characters, which would be very helpful to others.
Whereas I can only reach 2200 when I am either in a state of delirium where I had a bad day and the stupidity of a story pissed me off and I go in rant-mode (= not helpful), or when something truly is an absolute masterpiece.
So, here I don't write any reviews.
And I can force myself to read ONE long review, but I have neither the time nor the inner Nirvana to deal with many 2200-characters reviews of why "generic isekai 100003" sucks.
So, here I don't read any reviews.And I bet my bigger testicle that I am all but alone in this.
My 3 cents, set it to 1200 characters and change the voting system so that people can clearly separate if they agree/disagree with a review from how helpful/unhelpful they find it.
I mean 4 buttons. One to agree, one to disagree, one to mark as helpful even if you disagree or unhelpful even if you agree.
This will at same time solve the trolling issue of fans of a story massively downvoting a genuinely legitimate and helpful review, and will give you a way to filter out reviews that reach a threshold of unhelpfulness.
At same time you will have more people who write and read reviews.
= much more helpful.I personally am too old to give a s... about your decision. If I don't like a website I go to another.
But as I like here more than MAL for a few things, I decided to try pushing for a change in this, despite your hardcore line of "we won't ever change it", which btw, my 3 cents, it's a not the best way to interact with what gives life to a website: users.Bye.
... did you just write a 3300-character comment describing why 2200 characters are too much? Basenji is correct that there aren't any plans to lower that requirement. The current number works well to uphold quality while still being easy to reach, and the people complaining about it are a small minority.
There might be an alternative to long-form reviews at some point, but it would be explicitly separated from more in-depth reviews.
- continue this thread →
Is that sarcasm what I smell in your answer?
Just because I propose a change? It's not like I am calling you names.
And I thought that coming here from MAL (where the devs/admins don't give a shit about what users want) would mean finding people who are more open and friendly.
My bad I guess :)How long I write depends on what I write to whom.
A review of "reincarnated as a vibrator in a world of sexy elves" (if such an abomination would ever come to existence) in a website where 4/5 of the users are experienced hardcore bingers, would hardly need more then 200 characters.
But when I believe I am directly talking to intelligent, mature and open-minded people who administer a website and are supposed to be interested in what the users think, I might use more characters.
Again my bad if my assumptions and hopes were wrongly placed.Anyway, the micro-reviews, the way they have been described until now, would not be compatible with what I am proposing.
Imo they would only complicate the structure, and would not solve the issue of people who would like to write a splendid review that's shorter than 2200 but longer than a micro-review.
You could solve the issue in an imo more effective way by following my proposition from the previous message and adding a filter system so that people can sort reviews by length, by helpfulness, by agreeing rate, etc.
I am a UX Designer btw, in case this can help you see my opinion under a different light.Good luck with this place, given your defensive/offensive reaction to an emotionally-neutral non-aggressive proposition, I don't feel you are much different from the people of MAL, so between someone who doesn't care about what I need AND imposes imo ridiculous restrictions, or someone who simply doesn't care, the latter at least feels less claustrophobic to me.
Oh, one last thing: RottenTomatoes.
THE golden standard for reviews.
I have never seen shorter reviews from both professional reviewers and audience alike, anywhere else.
Do with this info whatever you like.
The thread "Why are review requirements such ass?" and it's comments have been merged into this thread.
You can view the merged thread's body below:
So that's why I'm suddenly getting comments on a 3 year old post lmao
Personally I just use MAL to read any shorter reviews, but I like the character limit here on AL because it guarantees that most reviews will actually be good quality, but I agree that there should be shorter reviews available. On the AL Roadmap they do plan to add micro reviews though, so I think it's just a matter of waiting
There is ZERO guarantee whatsoever that quantity = quality, neither in reviews nor in pretty much anything else.
While there are some genuinely brilliant long reviews (just as there are genuinely brilliant and very high quality shorter reviews) I have felt second-hand embarrassment most of the times when I've (tried to) read long reviews, for how they gave me an intense feeling of "shut-in trying very hard to push up his low self-esteem by writing an unnecessarily logorrheic review that makes him feel like he has a lot to say while the truth is that he's just saying a lot."
I have bunch of reviews I would like to bring over from MAL, all of them decently long, but none can even be posted because of the character limit...
In that case, they're likely not decently long if they don't go over the 2200 character limit. The limit is in place to prevent AL from being spammed with lots of short, unhelpful reviews.
They do have a micro reviews feature in the roadmap which should help with what you're looking for, but I feel that the character limit is the correct thing for AL to have done in order to keep up the quality of reviews.
The way you write your VERY subjective views like if they where objective god-sent universal laws feels very cringe to me.
There is NOTHING even remotely objective in the claim that anything shorter than 2200 characters is "too short", "low quality", "unhelpful" or whatever, and NO guarantee at all that a 2200-characters long review will be high quality and/or helpful. I actually feel just overwhelmed by long reviews and do not even start reading them. The few times I did I felt it was just logorrheic blahblah with very little truly helpful material.
The minimum requirement can totally be set much lower and still be very effective in preventing that a review is an unhelpful "I liked it / it sucks".
Also, what makes a review system REALLY useful is NOT just how efficiently it is at preventing "unhelpful" reviews but also how efficient it is at allowing a statistically high enough amount of reviews.
Tastes are subjective. reading one review rarely helps anybody.
But WHO THE F... has the time to read many 2200-characters reviews?
And who the f... wants to write one?
Look around, the amount of reviews in this website is way too low to reach ANY statistically meaningful AND helpful pseudo-objectivity.By making reviews too long, AniList is actually making them UNHELPFUL.
There is no objective way to determine what would be the more effective and balanced amount of minimum characters, but 2200 is imo not even remotely close to right.
Don't bother with the review system atm, it's not worth the time. Once you passed there character limit, you might meet the shadow council of reviews who, based on criteria only known to them, might tell you that your reviews suck and you NEED to change them according to their ideas.
If you want to review something either a) write it as a post in the global feed or b) create a forum thread and link the anime/manga. This way, you can do what ever you want, other people can see it more easily and people can comment on it.
This post was made by the Free Opinion Movement.
shadow council of reviews who, based on criteria only known to them, might tell you that your reviews suck and you NEED to change them according to their ideas.
Not sure if you're talking about users massdisliking any review that doesn't follow the popular opinion, which, sure, can happen. Or if you're talking about mods deleting reviews.
If the later, I really only seen the case happening with genuinely horrrible reviews, like that one dude who wrote 2200 "A"s and posted it, people who's 90% of the review was actually the wikipedia sinopsis and people who's reviews are either trolls or insulting the fanbase without even actually reviewing the anime/manga.
Maybe it's just me, but I never saw a review being deleted that didn't deserve to be deleted.No no, they just go to your profile and tell you how horrible your reviews are and everything you do you do wrong and then highly recommend you to change them how they want to them to be.
Oof, never had to deal with that, thankfully.
Fortunately that's also never actually happened. Rotkehlchen is seemingly referring a message Watashi left on their wall 3 of so years ago that was commenting on the review. Watashi doesn't and never had any ability to edit or remove a users review, she was simply actively commenting on peoples reviews with what she thought would be constructive advice.
She even went so far as to elaborate that she was talking as a user on the site who was interested in reviews and not as a mod. For verification of my description of events you can see the messages from her if you filter Rotkehlchen's page by messages.
Oh, lol, I thought he was talking about normal users, tbh
That's a problem on pretty any site that has a revieuw section and/or a comment section. You'll always will upset somebody because you didn't liked their favorite Chinese cartoon/any else type of entertainment and vice versa. Just ignore these kind of people exist. They aren't self-aware that they truly don't matter at all.
I feel you, I haven't bothered writing any reviews on this site. Although if i did get people commenting on my profile I wouldn't care, they'd just be wasting their time anyway
It was three years ago, maybe they disbanded or found another place to haunt. But the fact that in this three years the only thing that change is apparently the character limit being increased from 1500 to 2000 says a lot about how much time and effort went into the review feature. If you stick around a bit you'll notice the only thing that happens is people discussing pros and cons for voting on reviews without coming to a conclusion every few months.
Still a better system than Kitsu.
As I said, my advice to you is post a review in the global feed where it gets swallowed in minutes or as a forum post that only gets found by people that care about the anime/manga anyway.
But the fact that in this three years the only thing that change is apparently the character limit being increased from 1500 to 2000 says a lot about how much time and effort went into the review feature.
This statement does say a lot, but in the opposite way you intend it.
If you refer to our guidelines pages the rules for reviews were updated just as of this past winter.
They were? Cool, I stopped caring a while ago and don't intend to change that. But hey two years is better than three, right?
- continue this thread →
Prior to this year the mod stance was was that those requirements didn't need to be there. We had rules prior to that that are also shown in that same thread. Again you seem angry that another user commented on ways to improve your reviews (which should be expected tbh) and then you removed some of those reviews out of your own volition.
So yes I don't see any issues with the review rules staying the same from 2017-2019.
Don't bother with the review system atm, it's not worth the time. Once you passed there character limit, you might meet the shadow council of reviews who, based on criteria only known to them, might tell you that your reviews suck and you NEED to change them according to their ideas.
yeah that's never happened to me
lucky you
Wow, I might think it's much better than MAL. For me, 500 words are gross, I can't even tell an anime with just 500 words and 2200 words seem compatible for my preference as I like to endure with what I'm typing, I don't even care if it's 3000 words so long it's a satisfying review.
I disagree, i think 2200 is far too much effort. It's fine if a series has 300+ chapters, but those series will already have a couple of reviews, I think reviews should be a way to draw people's attention to less known manga/anime that people may not have heard of. The manga i view, there's nothing there. A lot of the time there isn't even a synopsis. It really makes a lot of manga feel dead.
No, the review is not a short story, it's an assessment based on your overall enjoyment and opinion about something, whether it's anime, manga, vn, ln, it doesn't matter. And also, I agree about manga, even though I don't read it, it seems better to have them in a separate way for the requirement. For the anime, I can't agree to disagree with 2200 characters requirements. I even need more than it to finish a review with "just" 11-12 episodes.
Not necessarily. I've managed to publish reviews of relatively short manga and I generally reach at least 3k characters.
Might be harder for one-shots, but personally I don't care much about one-shot reviews, as the time it takes you to read a review, you read the one-shot and have your own opinion.Ah, incredible. I thought it shouldn't be longer than what it usually takes to read but you made-up a good point there. Yes, agreed. I don't mind with a one-shot either, but I just would like to draw the attention to the people about a popular yet no so popular underrated anime series.
Well, if you do want to draw attention to works, and you can't write a full fledged review, you can always just post on global.
As a bit of a follow up of the one-shots and by talking about posting on global, I write first thoughts of the first chapter of a new manga, and of course they don't tend to reach 2k characters unless I'm particularly angry about a plot point, lol. So I post them on global and there's always people who do read it, plus they might comment and you got a more instant feedback.
So yeah, short thoughts/reviews, global is a fantastic place.
Ah, you can do it with a one-shot, just add some bullshit context
I mean, I'm sure you can... Personally I don't think I will unless it's a very interesting one-shot.
But the other day Isaw that there's a review for Chapter 1 of One Piece alone, so it's definitely feaseable.
To formally reply to this, there are no intentions at this time to change the character requirement. While "micro reviews" are a thing many people like to do, you are more than welcome to share those in a status or on a forum thread for a title.
Frankly 2200 characters is not a lot, I've written about a single scene in my favorite movie using more characters than that.
Some suggestions on how to improve on a review, elaborate on why the art works well. Elaborate on how the art/paneling/character designs inform the viewer/reader of some of the thematic messages in the text. Talk about how some of those things don't work well together and how they can actually create dissonance in a work. Delve in deeper.
i can easily write a 2200 words review on a one shot
Ah, btw, since I'm still salty, this is why the character limit is a good thing.
Tho, admitedly, since then, I've been creping up on the amount of likes.
i think this works much more as a reason to keep the character limit at 2200, btw is this the the time paradox ghost writer? i am pretty sure my review to it is in the top 3
Yeah, this is an argument in favor of the character limit, lol.
Yeah, it's for TPGW, nto sure which is your review, but there's no one with your nick on the front page, at least.
To note that reviews from people who completed automatically get above the preliminary ones.i have the makise profile picture and gave it a 3 , i did complete it but i wrote the review before i did
Ah, yeah. I think you're fourth. I remember reading your review.
it's a shitty review that doesn't deserve to be there so it yeah i support 2200 words limit
Heh, my reviews on MAL, I'm not sure no one gonna read it there, my reviews are worth it here, on that place, it's more like the trashes in an ocean full of diamonds lol.
It's easier to get noticed in AL, I think. There's less reviews, but I think the main part is that you do get your review on the front page, so you get a lot of exposition to them.
Plus, I love the dedicated page to it.
There is a character limit in opinions !? Damn I never knew about that. Well I guess you learn some thing new everyday. Kinda dumb though, like placing restriction or influence factors on opinions.
it's not an opinion , it's review
It may be too much but 150 words is really nothing tbh
Maybe 1000-1500 would make more sense[Removed]
If all you can muster is 500 characters about a series, why are you even bothering to review it. It makes me shudder to think how bad reviews would be if 500 was the character limit.
Actually, post your review as a reply to this post so I can see what we have to work with. Maybe I can help.
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I am tired of seeing this exact same complaint over and over get the exact same coverage.
I took it out on you and that was wrong. I'm sorry.
I do want to help you though. I would enjoy the opportunity to see what you consider a solid review of a series that doesn't go past 500 characters.
Personally, when I am not compelled to make a "proper" review, I put together a few thoughts after finishing something and post them to my profile instead. But it's as much about fostering a conversation with the people that follow me as it is about getting my thoughts down "on paper".
Like most word/character minimums, it's simply there to prevent people from submitting reviews without putting more thought and effort into them. Yes, longer reviews are not better, but the amount of time you have to spend thinking about those 2200 characters will also make you think more about what you're writing.
If there's something you want to say about an anime but don't want to put the effort into writing 2200 characters about it, you can always just make a status post about the show, or leave a note in your own list.
And 2200 characters is really not that long. If your words are on average 4 to 5 letters long, that's only around 500 words. That's just a single page of writing, really not that much.
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I think most people would actually be less likely to read reviews if the character minimum was lower or removed - the amount of worthless or otherwise poorly thought-out reviews that would storm pretty much every popular show would make every single review on those shows practically worthless. (And the like dislike/system, which should theoretically be in place to stop that, pretty much serves as a "i agree/disagree" system, so that wouldn't help that much, either)
If the idea is that you can read a quick review to decide whether or not you'll like an anime or not, you can just read the synopsis or tags, instead. Again, there are other ways to give your thoughts on anime, with status posts, forum threads, notes in lists, and internal ratings. All of those don't have word minimums, so it's good to have a place (the review tab) where there is a minimum and people are forced to put time and effort into crafting their thoughts.
In practice, does that always result in a better review? Hell no. Obviously not. And the review system definitely has room to improve elsewhere. But I don't think the minimum character count is what should be removed, since there's pretty much no good that could come out of that, at least not enough to outweigh the sea of bad that would flood any show with more than ten fans.
Ultimately all the review limit does in practice is either force people to make their reviews worse by padding them out with useless matter-of-fact statements, or makes them not post them at all. So while you'd in theory expect the quality of your reviews to go up, in practice it stays about the same, except there's no longer any short reviews to read for those who prefer them.
sometimes there isn't too much to say about a series, so occasionally I see people waxing poetic about stuff they don't really care about
I think 1000 characters would be way better. the character requirement is the only thing stopping me from writing a couple of reviews
I hope a mod merges your thread with any one of several others complaining about this exact same topic.
If you incapable of using the forum search option and are incapable of stringing together more than a paragraph about your opinion on a title, I don't see why it has any business gracing the front page of anything.
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How can I be in tears when the mod did the exact thing I asked for. They made your stupid, redundant thread go poof.
Post your 500 character review. I wanna read it and help you.
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I would never need help writing something on the internet.
And you wonder why there is a minimum character limit.
If all you can offer is roughly 2 twitter posts about a topic, is it really that important that others know your opinion?
i think they should reduce it a little bit
but we dont want a steam situation here, where guys are pulling out witty one liners instead of actually helpful reviews
To be fair, sometimes a good one-liner can do wonders for marketing.
I ended up watching (and really enjoying) Flip Flappers, because I scrolled down to the last paragraph on one of its reviews that said:
"You may not understand anything for a good 90% of the show but damn does it feel good whatever it is."I was instantly sold on the idea to at least give it a try.
Thanks @kc2rxo for the review on Flip Flappers. Even though I've only read the last two sentences of it.
Perhaps this is just me, but honestly, 2200 characters is nothing. Here's an example of the TL;DR paragraph from my own Shiki review:
Shiki is a masterclass in immersion, where the slow pace and the encroaching dread it wrought was completely arresting. With a lovely stylized look, a colorful roster of characters, moments that were phenomenally intense, a soundtrack and audio mixing that worked seamlessly, and an ending that left me completely satisfied, it was one of the most-engrossing anime viewing experiences I’ve had in a very long time. Combined with tightly-woven writing, it produced a mystery that had me longing to descend deeper into its dark corridors the further it went on. When it at last was over, I was filled with that sense of both exhaustion and fulfillment that only comes when you feel you’ve seen something truly worth your time. I certainly will not be forgetting it anytime soon.
^ That's 648 characters / 129 words. Even in that one paragraph, there is room to explore animation / aesthetics, the soundtrack, the tone, the plot, the pace, the writing, the overarching themes, etc. A review is less about convincing someone else that you're correct and more about explaining yourself clearly; it's an exercise in WHY, not WHAT. And explaining why something is the way that it is takes time. Even if the reader disagrees, you can make the effort to help them understand where you're coming from.
Are long reviews "better" by default? Certainly not. But that's dependent on the quality of the writer, just like how a short review is not necessarily "better" because it's "to the point."
I really don't know what you mean. Like a single page isn't that much, it's probably not even worth writing a review below that lengths cuz that would just be too surface level. A full on review is only really meant to be written when it is justified, and saying "I think this was good" just isn't that. Ofc you might want to express your thoughs on something, which is perfectly understandable but from the perspective of someone looking for a review, if the minimum length was less than half as much, that would just mean lots of unuseful reviews spamming the review section unnecessarily.
Look, here is a totally random recent review: https://anilist.co/review/15380, the review itself doesn't matter, I have not read it, but it literally all fits on my screen without zooming out or going fullscreen. And this is already 3000+ characters which is way more than the minimum. In fact this comment alone is already more than a third of the required length. See what I mean?
(Thread got merged so I'm just posting it here ig)
[Removed]
The review is bad, yes, but this is exactly what I said:
the review itself doesn't matter
It doesn't matter, reviews of this length are written all the time, and are shorter than the average review even.
And btw even removing his paragraph in the beginning it still hits the limit.If you can't write a review of this length you probably just shouldn't bother. You could write whatever you want in your notes or make a status post, it's not a bad thing if you don't write a review, but maybe at some point you'll find a show you can talk about so much that you'll easily write one.
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I just don't get why 2200 characters = an essay to you. You've written far more than that in the last 3 hours about a single subject. Why not treat anime the same way?
If you don't discuss the details then it's surface level. A medium like anime has much more complexity than that. It's not about how many words you use to get your message across. It's about getting more across. A bad reviewer will write 2200 words containing the message that can be said in 500. A good reviewer will actually include that much more actual content, and it's exactly that more content that separates a well written review from a regular expression of opinion. Yes, short customer reviews work for products you order but if all you write is "it's a good anime cuz ............" then everyone will do that and it will simply become a popularity contest, which doesn't work cuz unlike a good product/bad product anime isn't objective like that. Besides we already have the average score counter for that.
Why does everyone in this thread have such a stick up their arse? Just make it like Letterboxd and let people post literally whatever they want; could be a 20 page essay that no one cares about or wants to read, or a funny one liner or anything. Then you can just let the upvoting system decide which ones people actually want to see, very simple.
The upvoting system right now doesn't work, as 95% of people use it to upvote reviews they agree with and downvote reviews they don't - in addition to that, reviews are displayed on a total upvotes basis, not on a weighted percentage basis, which is also not great for finding good reviews.
Because of that, lower review requirements would just lead to flooded review pages and make it harder to actually get critiques of a show you're interested in. I do think microreviews should be added, it's a good idea and I think would satisfy the majority of people that want lower review requirements. For now, forum threads, status posts, and list notes should be good enough.
Then you can just let the upvoting system decide which ones people actually want to see, very simple.
Any and every platform should be seeking a userbase. Thats all having some standards is doing, its advertising yourself as to the userbase you wish to seek out. Personally I'd like to see actual quality in my reviews, things that will make me consider different angles that I hadn't considered or just make really strong arguments for a viewpoint. Funny one lines can be fun, but they aren't good reviews. If you have a one liner you want to give, you can place that in your review summary as many users already do but that means you actually need to have a thoughtful piece to go alongside it.
I feel very alone in believing the character count should be raised, or even a word count added :')
The thread "Perhaps review character count threshold can be reduced to 1000? Would help more reviews get added to AniList. " and it's comments have been merged into this thread.
You can view the merged thread's body below:
I was thinking about this as I tried to contribute some reviews today. Obviously, we don't want a 250 character count to facilitate one sentence reviews, but as this site aims to collect more of a database of reviews to strengthen itself (and the legacy reviews are still one of the main appeals of MAL), I think a 2200 threshold is just a little too much. Ended up contributing just 2 reviews today when I was planning to quickly do around 5 or more in a burst because I was hard-pressed to come up with another paragraph after hitting 1800 - 1900.
