No Neutrality on Steepster? Positive bias?

The issue with ratings, it seems to me, is that in part, they are for our own personal use. If I rate a tea very low, I may own it, and want to refer to that rating a year or two down the road to see how I like it later (mostly a pu erh thing). It is not always meant to be a valuation for others to use. Though I also think it is for others to use at their own peril, ie to be taken with a grain of salt.

Overall, I sympathize with the first post in this thread. Some of us more sensitive types don’t want to make the tea companies feel bad. There, I said it. That’s just how I roll. I worry about giving bad ratings and bad reviews, so I tend not to do it. And I don’t like vendors responding to my reviews, as much as I really like the vendors that post on Steepster. It feels like an intrusion. That’s just my view, and I totally get it that most people may not feel this way.

I stopped rating a while ago as well and refrain from doing so unless specifically asked to by a company that has provided me with tea for review. I stopped doing so because often I had no point of comparison for the tea I was trying and then secondly because my tastes and preferences can often vary widely from day to day. What I have tried to do is capture texture scent and taste in my notes so that a reader may see if it is something that appeals to them. Like others I tend to read the notes rather than look at the rating when looking at the tea. One thing I do notice is that if you leave no rating the rating box goes red, even if you click the recommended button. I wonder if there is a way for the programme to see these reviews as neutral as this colouring is maybe deceptive for teas that have not been left a numerical rating?

Interesting question. I deliberately waited until today to do anything about it, because I wanted to have better time to read it properly.

1. Anonymous moniker I do this. I do it out of preservation of my own privacy. I do it so that everybody I know can’t just stumble across what I’m doing online and go “oh, it’s her! I shall have to ask her about this next I see her!” If I wanted others to know what I did online, I would tell them myself. Otherwise it’s none of their business. Facebook is the ONLY place on the internet where I use my real name. Ever. I don’t give it out unless I have to. Unless people need my address for some reason or other, it doesn’t matter what my real name is. So I use a taken name of my own choosing (two actually, depending on purpose) and I use that everywhere online. I have put a lot of thought into choosing it and I identify with it almost as much as I do my given name.

2. Free samples I’ve had vendors contact me and offer free samples a couple of times. I can’t remember if I’ve ever said no thanks, but I don’t think so. I always tell them with no uncertainty whatsoever that I always try to be honest when writing posts and if the tea wasn’t to my liking, my post would reflect that. Nobody has ever had a problem with that. Once I was even told that they were expecting that very same thing from me.

3. Honesty I always try to be honest. Always. But the thing to remember is that any attempt at describing something that you have tasted can never be objective. Ever. Oh, you can be objective in that you can try and taste it on its own terms without looking at what the brand is, whether it’s a tiny single estate thing or a great big Unilever Group operation, but you can’t be objective about the actual taste or smell of it. You can only write what you thought of it and the experience that you had and there it becomes very subjective indeed. It’ll depend on which mood you’re in, the time of day, whether you just had a cold last week or if it’s raining or not, you know? Or even if it’s tea from an area you generally enjoy or don’t enjoy. Personally, if you give me a Fujian black of any sort, it has already scored high simply for being a Fujian black. My most favouritest favourites are produced in Fujian you see. On the other hand, I don’t much care for Darjeeling so if you give me one of those I’ll typically put it between 60 and 75 points, so while 75 points doesn’t seem like a very high rating, really, it still reflects a rather good experience for me. This is also why I can’t in anyway streamline the rating scale because my choice of rating depends very much on the type of tea I’m having.

4. The rating scale It’s a very intuitive thing for me, using the points system, which is also why I will always resist other people’s attempts at ‘improving’ it. For me, it can’t be improved. It works perfectly for me the way it is. I’d be more likely to stop using it, if it was changed (read: broken). Some people refuse to use the lower half of the scale because they think it will be an unfair detraction from the tea’s score, and they don’t want to create a negative bias. Excuse me, is a positive bias not equally as inaccurate? The lower half is there so that we can use it. If everybody refused to use anything less than 50, then wouldn’t 50-60 just become the new lower bit of the scale? Then we can’t use that either, because we can’t rate low. Eventually we’d have to cram everything in betwee 95 and 100 points. Okay, that might be exaggerated, but I think it illustrates why I think refusing to use the lower end is so silly. Either use the whole scale or none of it.

I tend not to look at it much in other people’s posts. It’s an attention-catcher if the rating is particularly low or particularly high, but I do also see some real head-scratchers. An all round positive sounding review and only 35 points. Or a text that consists more less only of ‘bleurgh!’ or the equivalent thereof and 75 points.

5. Negative reviews As mentioned, I will always try to be honest. I write my post based on the experience I had with the tea. Really, I rate the experience more than I rate the tea, and that includes all outside factors as well. If one of the cats were to come and purr at me while tasting it, that might be enough to make me pliable and add a point or two. It’s rare that I rate anything on the lower end of the scale, but when I do the text generally reflect my feelings as well as the rating. I write what I experience, or at least I try to. It doesn’t matter to me if the vendors are looking and it doesn’t matter to me if it’s a big cooperation or a small one-man-company. If I don’t like something I don’t like it and I’m not going to lie about it. Only once have I seen a vendor blow his top over a negative review, but I don’t really count that because that person was already a known troublemaker under a different name both here and elsewhere, and so therefore hardly representative of the vendors we normally deal with. I can’t remember if they asked Jason to close their account or if they were kicked off the site, but either way they were removed.

Sure a vendor might get disappointed if you didn’t like what they had been working on, but the thing you (and they) have to remember is that taste is subjective. Not everybody can like all the same things. Just because I didn’t like something doesn’t mean that others won’t, and I sincerely hope nobody bases their tea choices solely on what I thought of something.

I feel that if you are not honest with this, if you can’t bring yourself to say ‘I didn’t like this very much’, then you are not trustworthy. If I can’t trust you to say when you dislike something, how can I know if you truly liked the other things you wrote about?

So to sum up. No, I’ve never had problems with remaining neutral. I am not here for the vendor’s sake. I’m here for my sake and if I can’t be honest with myself, then what’s the point?

I worry a bit, yes, about hurting feelings or causing negativity. I try not to let it actually effect my ratings, though. It admittedly does some, I feel, but not for the most part.

Humorously, the worst response I’ve ever gotten on a bad review and rating was from another user basically saying I should be reviewing the packaging and not the tea. That I should only give a negative one if the tea came moldy or the shipment damaged.

I found (and find, hence remembering it) this very odd. I rate what I’m tasting, not the packaging.

Moldy arrival? Sure, but I’d not come down hard until I’d spoken with the seller and saw how they handled fixing the situation so that I could give that as input. If they were mortified and sent me a healthy batch I’d mention it in my review but also mention they fixed it. If they said “sucks to be you” that’d seriously be put in there lol.

But yeah, that kinda made me laugh. Apparently I’m not supposed to ever give a negative rating on the taste of a tea since taste is subjective I was told. (Again, not by a seller)

I don’t think negative reviews are an issue; it’s not so much what you say but HOW you say it. Often negative reviews reveal more about the person who wrote them than the tea they are reviewing.

I don’t post reviews often, but the ones I do post tend to be positive for a couple reasons.

When I first started drinking tea, I explored lots of different teas before I really discovered my tastes. There are whole types of teas I dislike, and it seems sort of meaningless to me to write a review of a sample I got saying “this puerh is bad” when I know that to me almost all puerhs will taste bad even if it happens to be one of the best in the world.

Now that I know the kinds of tea I like, that’s what I tend to order. So most of the things I’m drinking now are either things I know I like, or that sound similar to things I like or have the same base tea, and so it’s probable that I’m going to like it.

Finally, I recognize taste is personal. When I was a kid I was a picky eater and my mom would often remind me that no food is intrinsically bad, it’s just whether you like it or not. Thus i tend to think it’s more informative to describe what a tea tastes like, how it looks etc, so people can decide if thats the sort of thing they might enjoy.

All that said, I don’t have any problem reading a review that is negative, but I find it more informative if people explain why they didn’t like something. One of the interesting things about a forum is that people have different views and experiences, and I can often learn a lot (even from people I may disagree with).

Ratings aside, I think one big reason for the positive skew is that teas in general are mostly good. Tea companies wouldn’t be in business long selling bad tea.

I don’t see how you can rate a tea per se so the ratings system for me is redundant – what I might like you might hate and vice versa

What would be good would be vendor ratings – value for money, speed of delivery, customer service, how they dealt with complaints, freshness of the tea, packaging

When i’ve done reviews its all about did I enjoy that tea but also on what the vendor was like towards me as a customer. I bought a large order from a uk supplier but the delivery was slow, email correspodance was next day at best and the teas came with no brewing information. So that took their ratings right down.