Are Negative Reviews Bad?
I was thinking about this Readercon panel recently, particularly this bit:

Gordon Van Gelder commented that the lack of editorial presence at most online websites has led to a proliferation of bad reviews. Tom Purdom agreed about the value of an editor. […] Ernest Lilley mentioned that at the website of which he is the editor, he exerts a high degree of editorial control, hardly ever publishing a negative review and keeping reviews to a limited word count.

Are negative reviews something to be avoided? Obviously I am biased on this because some of my reviews are perhaps somewhat more towards the negative side than the positive, much as someone whose job involved tossing live kittens into a threshing machine might be biased in favour of tossing live kittens into a threshing machine. It's even possible that I can't see just how negative my reviews are, judging by the reaction to what I thought was a very restrained comment about the Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson Dune books.

I'll toss it out to the floor: do negative reviews have a positive utility or are they just mean? Should reviwers limit themselves to reviewing only those books that they liked or can some good come from pointing out the flaws in recent works?

And this bit:

The panelists talked about the ability that online reviews often grant readers to quickly comment on reviews; the panelists saw this as a negative, as leading people to write reviews in order to have a personal audience.

also gave me something to think about. If I try very hard, perhaps some day I can be as self-effacing as John Clute.

(68 comments) - (Post a new comment)

rimrunner 2007-07-24 04:12 pm UTC (link)

I'm trying to figure out why having a personal audience is an inherently bad thing. I know that I'm more likely to give particular reviewers more weight in making my reading decisions because I know something about those reviewers' taste in fiction. I also wonder just how they're planning to combat this phenomenon, given that traditional reviewing venues seem to be drying up. (And somewhat less traditional ones, too; I haven't written a paid review for Amazon for years, and while they still do that, the site is a lot less editorial-driven than it used to be, because it turned out that other customers' reviews were better drivers of sales.) (Reply to this) (Thread)

knotty_pine 2007-07-26 11:56 am UTC (link)

Why can having a personal audience be a bad thing? Well, let's analogize it to a similar phenomenon in the wine world. Instead of James Nicoll we'll use, oh, Robert Parker. A review by Robert can make or break a wine, so some (not all) wine producers begin to cater to his particular prejudices. Robert likes hedonistic fruit bombs? Okay, suddenly half of the 2007 vintage is being made into fruit-forward, high-alcohol wines. Oh, you like mild wines with lots of minerality? Sorry, Robert doesn't. Better luck next generation. Developing a cult of personality can allow one person to have influence over an entire field. Is this necessarily bad? Depends on your point of view. The reason Robert Parker is so influential is that his taste agrees with that of a lot of people, so those people are quite happy with the effects he has (except in the realm of pricing). Now, SF is a bit different, and I don't think we're in danger of any one person becoming the arbiter of what's good and bad in the field. *Everyone* who's even the least bit interested in wine has heard of Robert Parker; within SF, there aren't even a lot of writers that you can say that about, let alone reviewers. Once stores start using ratings by James Nicoll as the main selling point for books, then we can get worried. (Reply to this) (Parent)

apis_mellifera 2007-07-24 04:18 pm UTC (link)

My priority as a reviewer is primarily to the readers, not to the authors. And if a book is flawed in a way that I find detrimental the book as a whole, I'm going to point it out. Now, I may not mention minor flaws, but that's often due to the extremely tight word count I have to work with. The job of a reviewer is not to blow sunshine up the author's ass, it's to let people know whether or not a book is worth spending money on. I think some people forget that. Reviews are not just a source for blurbs! Readers use them too! (I do tend to skew more towards positive reviews these days, but that's because I generally review books that I'm pre-disposed to enjoy.) (Reply to this)

	ninebelow 2007-07-24 04:18 pm UTC (link)
	I find it hard to be polite about the idea that negative reviews shouldn't be published. Suffice to say it is nonsense. (Reply to this) (Thread)(Expand)

	grahamsleight 2007-07-24 04:21 pm UTC (link)
	Yes. (Reply to this) (Parent)

(no subject) - coalescent, 2007-07-24 04:42 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - james_nicoll, 2007-07-24 06:23 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - coalescent, 2007-07-24 07:10 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - ninebelow, 2007-07-24 07:25 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - coalescent, 2007-07-24 07:31 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - ecbatan, 2007-07-25 04:47 am UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - james_nicoll, 2007-07-24 07:45 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - buymeaclue, 2007-07-24 05:09 pm UTC (Expand)

kuangning 2007-07-24 04:24 pm UTC (link)

I think that, as with most things, excess on either side is to be avoided. A reviewer/publication/venue who never says "I didn't like it" gets ignored as a shill, while one who never says "I liked it" comes across as generally biased toward the negative. In either case, the opinion expressed on any single piece gets severely discounted -- especially after the first couple of times you take the review as a guideline and wind up disagreeing with the opinion. People being people, though, we'll forgive and forget a false negative much more readily than a steady stream of cheerful but wearisome "OMG it's great" about things that later disappoint. It's easier to tell ourselves we have better taste than a reviewer when s/he talks down something we later find we like than to admit the cheery reviewer might have seen something we didn't, when s/he reviewed that work we loathed. (Reply to this)

	lederhosen 2007-07-24 04:29 pm UTC (link)
	'The Da Vinci Code' attracted lots of reviews, both positive and negative. Had I not seen the negative ones, the positive ones would probably have induced me to read it. This would have been a Bad Thing. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	rimrunner 2007-07-24 04:47 pm UTC (link)
	The negative ones induced me to try reading it. ("No, really: can it be that bad?" Answer: yes.) No review, positive or negative, could've gotten me past about page 25 or so. That's when I got sufficiently annoyed to give up. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)(Expand)

(no subject) - lederhosen, 2007-07-24 05:37 pm UTC (Expand)

viktor_haag 2007-07-24 04:32 pm UTC (link)

do negative reviews have a positive utility • "They sell papers"? (That is, they encourage people to regularly consume the source of the negative reviews, thus encouraging that source to continue producing content, assuming that the continuance is predicated on the consumption?) • They can provide for a point of critical comparison between what artifacts might have value and which might not (and the axis of value can be left up to the critic to declare, implicitly or explicitly). • They provide the reader with a more rounded picture of the tastes and opinions of the reviewer, helping the reader to be more informed about whether the reviewer's points of view or recommendations might be more or less in line with the reader's own. • They can provide the forum producing the reviews with an overall sense of "well-roundedness" and thus act as a measure towards establishing (or enhancing) credibility as a source of criticism. • They can be fun to read in a way that positive reviews are not. They can be fun to write in a way that positive reviews are not. Should reviewers limit themselves to reviewing only those books that they liked or can some good come from pointing out the flaws in recent works I don't see these as necessarily opposed or mutually exclusive behaviours. A reviewer might "like" a book with a "flaw". A reviewer might "dislike" a book with no "flaws". A reviewer may believe that he or she does the utmost in order to avoid the notion of subjective "like" or "dislike" to entire into the question at all. I'm inclined to think that reviews that express a reviewer's like or dislike for the material really only have utility for the reader if the reader is going to use that review as a guide to expectation about whether the reader will like or dislike the book, and thus use it as a guide to whether the reader should spend the time to read the book or avoid it. Critical reviews that are based not on like or dislike, but rather on some other axis of value, I'm inclined to believe really only have value if the reader actually reads the work in question. Otherwise, how can the reader hope to engage in the debate or really follow along with the context and argument of the review in the first place. (Reply to this) (Thread)

brooksmoses 2007-07-24 04:47 pm UTC (link)

Something that sort of fits into that list and sort of doesn't: They can allow the reviewer to make meaningful positive reviews. Though this applies more to the case where reviews are not myopically sorted into "negative" or "positive", but are seen as more of a scale, and generally point out both the good and the bad things about books. One reviewer (a friend of mine), whose stuff I find particularly valuable to me as a reader, gives everything a rating on a scale of one to ten. Six is what a book gets if he feels that the time reading it was well spent. Most books that he likes tend to get a seven, and he explains pretty clearly what the good things and the flaws are that contributed to that judgement. Sometimes the flaws are things that would be really annoying to me personally, sometimes they're things I wouldn't care about. The thing about giving most books a seven is that, for the dozen or so books that he's given a nine to, that nine really matters. Because he doesn't give out top marks to everything, he can use them to mean something particularly significant, and his regular readers notice them -- or, at least, I do. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)(Expand)

(no subject) - fivemack, 2007-07-24 05:10 pm UTC (Expand)

jhetley 2007-07-24 04:40 pm UTC (link)

Item the First -- I think reviewers should limit themselves to reviewing books they've actually, you know, _read_. This dumps a number of Amazon.com reviewers on their collective asses. Item the Second -- a negative review can have a positive effect. I recall a saying of one of my architectural clients, a school superintendent. "The only bad publicity is no publicity." Getting a negative review in KIRKUS ranks as a step up from being totally ignored... (Reply to this) (Thread)(Expand)

viktor_haag 2007-07-24 04:46 pm UTC (link)

Item the first: review only what you read In principle, I agree with you. However, are you willing to accept a small class of reviewers who say things like, "I cannot recommend this book, or indeed, caution you against it strongly enough. I was physically unable to force myself to read past the first one hundred pages for this reason and that reason and the other." (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)(Expand)

(no subject) - jhetley, 2007-07-24 05:02 pm UTC (Expand)

raised hand - the_blue_fenix, 2007-07-24 05:36 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - sclerotic_rings, 2007-07-24 05:41 pm UTC (Expand)

	hurts so good j_larson 2007-07-24 04:43 pm UTC (link)
	Aren't most authors starved for attention to the point that even a negative review is better than no notice at all? Yo, novelists! Given the choice, would you rather have, in a prominent forum, a) a scathingly negative review, b) a yawn-snore mediocre one, or c) nothing at all? (Reply to this) (Thread)(Expand)

Re: hurts so good anghara 2007-07-24 05:28 pm UTC (link)

(a) would devastate me in the short term, but if it was intelligent and made good points it would be actually, yanno, USEFUL in improving my writing for the next one. (b)would, if you believe this, sting more. If I cannot stir up passion with my work - positive OR negative - there is something really badly wrong and I need to examine my style, my themes and my own passion. (c) is death. There is nothing worse than oblivion. (Reply to this) (Parent)

Re: hurts so good - rezendi, 2007-07-24 06:20 pm UTC (Expand)

Re: hurts so good - rachelmanija, 2007-07-24 06:31 pm UTC (Expand)

montoya 2007-07-24 04:53 pm UTC (link)

Without negative reviews, positive reviews are meaningless. I subscribed to Stereophile once. After about two issues, it was impossible not to notice that every single review ended up saying, "This piece of equipment is great and sounds phenomenal and you should totally buy it." Either they're full of shit, or things are so great that I can choose at random and get something excellent, and in either case the reviews are worthless. (Reply to this)

	nihilistic_kid 2007-07-24 04:57 pm UTC (link)
	Negative reviews sell as many books as positive ones. I also find it funny that van Gelder tsk-tsks the lack of editorial control, and then publishes Truesdale's web column, which is clearly not edited for clarity, brevity, or the explication of theses. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	sclerotic_rings 2007-07-24 05:35 pm UTC (link)
	Well, I think it's because Truesdale also published my ignorant columns, thus allowing the cycle of life to continue. After all, even screwworms and shit-ticks have a place in the ecosystem. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	ratmmjess 2007-07-24 05:04 pm UTC (link)
	I think negative reviews do have a positive utility. They can steer readers away from bad fiction, they can point out that the Emperor has no clothes, they can provide an author with a necessary corrective, and they can simply entertain the audience. Negative reviews don't always do all or any of these, but they can have a positive utility. (Reply to this)

jwgh 2007-07-24 05:16 pm UTC (link)

Maybe when they're talking about negative reviews like this one, which seem to exist mainly to amuse the author and readers without giving much of a hint as to whether I'm likely to actually enjoy the movie or not. (Well, maybe 'if you really want to know what “Transformers” feels like, think of a hundred-and-thirty-five-minute, hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar retread of “Herbie Goes Bananas”' gives a good hint.) Is there a lot of snark-for-the-sake-of-snarking going on in the online reviewing communities? (Reply to this)

bethzebra 2007-07-24 05:17 pm UTC (link)

I think negative reviews have definite utility. I don't read as many literary reviews as most here, but on sites which allow customer reviews of products I get a lot of use out of the negative reviews. I think the danger of negative reviews is that (IMHO) it's easier to write a funny, entertaining negative review of something than it is to write a funny, entertaining positive review of something. I think some reviewers spend a lot more time gleefully skewering things than lauding them because it's fun as opposed to serving a serious purpose. On unedited sites, this impulse may get out of control I guess, but I'm not sure that that's a point against negative reviews per se. (Reply to this)

dd_b 2007-07-24 05:23 pm UTC (link)

Reviews are valuable for their factual content, plus for the opinions of the reviewer. Factual content isn't subjective, exactly (though people may disagree about what a book actually says in some cases), but selecting which facts to present is still subjective. The opinions of the reviewer are of course subjective. I find both useful in theory -- and in practice, if the reviewer cares about enough of the same things I do. A site restricted to good reviews only is less useful than one without such an editorial requirement. Sometimes a "bad review" will sell me a book -- if they say it's mostly good but has this one huge flaw, and the huge flaw is something that won't bother me or even something I might like, for example. An argument can be made that it's not worth the space to publish bad reviews, there are enough good books out there that you can just spend your time on them. I don't agree with this; while I wouldn't bother with bad reviews of new writers, it's important to catch the brain-eater early (even though there are currently no treatment options). (Reply to this) (Thread)

epi_lj 2007-07-24 05:34 pm UTC (link)

I have to agree that negative reviews have often sold me on books. I recall at a convention recently that a lot of people expressed that they didn't really like a certain body of work from a given author (but instead preferred a different body of work from the same author). However, the things they complained about -- confusing stories, lack of closure, stories with no explicit plot or plot arc, etc. -- were things that really interest me, so that made me want to buy those books. (Reply to this) (Parent)

anghara 2007-07-24 05:24 pm UTC (link)

I write reviews. SOmetimes I write reviews that skewer a book. NOT OFTEN. But if a book requires skewering, it's gonna get it - if they ask me for a review they'll get an honest one. And you know what? I still get email referencing one particular review that I did for SFSite YEARS ago now. It was a skewerer. And people are STILL agreeing with me on that. As an author I'd hate to be on the receiving end, of course - but people have opinions, and a negative opinion is just as valuable as a positive one, IMHO. If something is broken, you need to know how to fix it. of course, I'm talking about negative reviews which actually say WHY the reviewer disliked the book and are intelligent about it - the kind of review that merely says, "this stinks, and the writer is an idiot" is less than helpful. (Reply to this)

epi_lj 2007-07-24 05:32 pm UTC (link)

Was any argument provided as to why negative reviews are bad, other than that they might hurt the feelings of authors? I think that any control over whether negative or positive reviews get published skews perception of the work. I can see where that might be bad if your interest was in selling more books, but if your interest is in helping people select books, then I think both negative and positive reviews are necessary, and that the more closely the published review set reflects the overall set of reader reactions, the better. If there are to be no negative reviews, how can you look at a positive review and take that as a sign that you should buy the book? (Reply to this)

ilona_andrews 2007-07-24 05:34 pm UTC (link)

There is a great deal of difference between a negative review and a bad review. A negative review states the reviewer's opinion that faults of the work outweigh its best points and provides arguments in support of such conclusion. A bad review is a review that is poorly written for a number of reasons, some of which might be: a) A reviewer has an agenda - The reviewer dislikes a particular author on the basis of personality/gender/prior work b) A reviewer is unable to coherently translate his opinion of the book to paper - the review makes no sense, often giving an impression that the reviewer has not read the book at all. c) A reviewer is apathetic - a reviewer seems to be recycling what everyone else has said about the book. A good clue to this is that most of the reviews by said person sound the same. Bad reviews harm the sales of what might be a good book, but more, they are harmful to authors. My favorite example of such reviews are (these are actual from reviews of my crap): 4 stars instead of 5 because this book uses elements of science fiction. - I am just not sure about the meaning of this one. LOVED the book but romance element isn't very strong so 31/2 stars out of 5 - the book was not marketed as romance. Why make the bad guy so completely nasty? There is a lot of gratuitous ugliness (rape, cannibalism, many dead bodies) in the story that does nothing to strengthen the plot. - If you take away the fact that the bad guy rapes and kills, then he stops being the bad guy, but in this case I tagged this line because it gives impression of book having rape scenes. There are none. There is mention of rape and victims of rape, but no actual rape scene. What the reviewer might have been trying to say is that book had too much gore for his/her taste, but they were not quite able to get that point across. Should reviewers be censored? No. Everyone has a right to their opinion. But those who write reviews professionally should be able to present their thoughts in a logical clear manner. (Reply to this)

sclerotic_rings 2007-07-24 05:34 pm UTC (link)

"leading people to write reviews in order to have a personal audience" I hate to say it, but that's not particularly new. In fact, Clute's comment pretty much describes the main reason for being of far too many music, movie, and book reviewers over the last century. H.L. Mencken had a very good reason for refusing free tickets or books when he did reviews, because for every writer who reviews for the right reasons, you get forty or fifty who do so in order to scream "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?" whenever they feel slighted. (Here in Dallas, we had one such music reviewer for one of our weekly newspapers who was notorious for both demanding freebies and extras in exchange for coverage and then bitch-slapping the subject because s/he conceded the freebies he wanted. Even after allegations that he suddenly shifted gears in his reviews from adoration to outrage over a local folksinger because she wouldn't fuck him, he somehow remained on the payroll, and musicians all through the Dallas area receiving similar treatment from other media venues refer to it as "getting Wilonskeyed". I wish he was alone, but he actually encouraged an entire generation of bad critics in the Metroplex who worry more about the swag they'll receive, and the tantrums they'll throw in print if they don't get the accolades they feel they deserve, than they do about writing a reasonably informed review.) Now, if you think this is bad, wait until you start discussing dining critics. Out here in Dallas, the weekly Dallas Observer doesn't just get hate mail for its particularly ignorant dining critics: it's actually had to settle out of court several times over libel suits that it would have lost every time. If you want to talk about ignorant axe-grinding, just talk to a few people in the restaurant business who've been on the receiving end of reviews generated because the restaurant fired with good cause a close personal friend of the critic. (Reply to this)

lpetrazickis 2007-07-24 05:41 pm UTC (link)

If you don't have negative reviews, then I don't know what you don't like. I have no way of assessing the accuracy of your reviews. I no longer read your reviews. Toronto has a music magazine, @(((*&#$#@ (actual name similar), that only publishes positive reviews. Reviews have lots of inventive adjectives and adverbs. They don't have numeric ratings. I don't read the magazine. Metro, a free daily, publishes comic book reviews. The ratings range from 4 stars to 5 stars. I read them to familiarize myself with the synopses, but I would never, ever buy a comic book based on just a recommendation in one of the reviews. Metro also publishes my favourite movie critic, Norm Wilner. He gives lots of negative reviews, and his positive reviews are usually on the mark. I follow his recommendations very closely. Positive reviews are worthless without negative reviews to give perspective. (Reply to this)

ross_teneyck 2007-07-24 05:52 pm UTC (link)

I've occasionally thought that it would be useful to come up with a "standard set" of, say, ten books or stories in a given genre, and invite people who wish to be reviewers to submit reviews of each of them to a well-known web site. The purpose of this would be to allow a reader, having read the standard set themselves and formed their own opinions, to "calibrate" any given reviewer against the readers own preferences. Knowing that John Q. Reviewerman despises soft SF on principle, or is easily impressed by witty dialog, or whatever, is useful information when you're reading one of his reviews and trying to decide if it means that you will like the book in question. Ideally the standard set would include at least one or two real turkeys, so the potential reader can see how Mr. Reviewerman handles a bad book. Does he take the opportunity to lampoon it comically? Does he balance good points and bad points? Or does he write about it as positively as all the others? Again, useful information for calibrating a reviewer. (Reply to this) (Thread)(Expand)

	kate_nepveu 2007-07-24 06:15 pm UTC (link)
	Well, then, what would you put in it? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)(Expand)

(no subject) - j_larson, 2007-07-24 06:33 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - kate_nepveu, 2007-07-24 06:37 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - ross_teneyck, 2007-07-24 06:37 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - ross_teneyck, 2007-07-24 06:35 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - kate_nepveu, 2007-07-24 06:44 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - buymeaclue, 2007-07-25 03:40 pm UTC (Expand)

jamesenge 2007-07-24 06:02 pm UTC (link)

I agree with most of what's been said about the utility of negative reviews (when meaningful, not mere snarking for one's own amusement)... but is it possible that this wasn't what Van Gelder was talking about? Maybe he (or his amanuensis) was using "bad reviews" to mean crappy useless reviews along Klausnerian lines, or log-rolling, or partisan knifing, or incoherent quacking by someone who remembers only intermittently that their shift key might have some sort of useful function. I seem to see a lot of that stuff in the Amazon "Customer Reviews" sections and it has made me long for some sort of filter, perhaps in the form of a very large cork. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	knotty_pine 2007-07-26 11:29 am UTC (link)
	James was responding to "Ernest Lilley mentioned that at the website of which he is the editor, he exerts a high degree of editorial control, hardly ever publishing a negative review" (Reply to this) (Parent)

	kate_nepveu 2007-07-24 06:14 pm UTC (link)
	Pretty much what everyone else has said about the utility of negative reviews. I'll add that I set out to write _something_ about everything I read, and in that case negative reviews can't be avoided (though maybe they should be, as I'd have saved myself a lot of time reviewing this year's Hugo nominees . . . ). (Reply to this)

martin_wisse 2007-07-24 06:17 pm UTC (link)

Nobody sane is against negative reviewers; without negative reviews you get Locus, where every book reviewed is great and most reviews are just plot recaps. If you don't want negative reviews as a writer, write good books. Myself, most of my bookreviews are at least moderately positive, as I don't review books I don't finish and I don't finish books I don't enjoy at some level. Doesn't mean I can't be critical. (Reply to this) (Thread)(Expand)

james_nicoll 2007-07-24 06:26 pm UTC (link)

If you don't want negative reviews as a writer, write good books. Actually, that won't eliminate negative reviews. For one thing, you'd still books of [catagory] reviewed by people who think that the entire idea of [catagory] is silly or worse. Let me preface this with "He later apologised, put the apology where he thought people would see it and withdrew the review". Spider Robinson's review of De Camp's bio of Lovecraft would be an example. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)(Expand)

(no subject) - le_trombone, 2009-06-05 05:28 pm UTC (Expand)

(no subject) - bluetyson, 2007-07-25 11:31 am UTC (Expand)

rfrancis 2007-07-24 06:47 pm UTC (link)

I'm not sure I'm fit to speak in sweeping generalizations. Personally, I don't do negative reviews, simply because I doubt my ability to be useful or constructive or whatever, although I daresay I could probably save a consumer a few wasted bucks or hours or both. Which, I guess, means the answer may be in that question: who's the review written for? The creator or the consumer? If the former, then a negative review that's useful is, while not impossible, not for the faint-hearted. On the other hand, if it's for the benefit of the consumer, then honestly, I think it has clear value without even being constructive (although it should strive to be informative, shouldn't it?) Of course, the answer is probably that's both, which makes it as vague as I suspected. That's what I get for going ahead and being general. As I say, I don't do them, myself, because I'd prefer not to spend my time on things I don't like, and while I'm willing to draw the connection "I like this, so maybe other people would like it for similar reasons," I'm for some reason less willing to say "I don't like this, so maybe other people will dislike it for similar reasons." Hmm. I give this comment 1.5 stars out of 4! (Reply to this)

	burger_eater 2007-07-24 07:52 pm UTC (link)
	If I were to try to defend a positive-only review policy, I suppose I would say that positive reviews direct people to good books and that every negative review is a lost opportunity to acknowledge something good. Which doesn't really count when it comes to blogs and such, since column inches aren't restricted. (Reply to this)

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