| craigd |
03-11-2019 07:33 PM |
Like sidewinder22, I’ve given a lot of thumbs up to reviews on courses I’ve played. In fact, I use the “course tracker” feature a lot for that reason. I pretty much track every course I’ve played. I have a routine when logging into DGCR where I hit “my dashboard” and then “course tracker” and it pulls up any new info about the courses I’m tracking, which of course includes new reviews. Anyway, it’s always interesting to hear new perspectives and I especially enjoy reviews where I can sort of walk along the course in my head. That’s obviously the easiest way to tell if a review is helpful or not.
Of course, reading reviews prior to hitting a new course is nice and helps build excitement too. I’ll usually dish out some thumbs while planning a trip or researching a course.
As far as course ratings are concerned, I look at them like I do for product reviews on Amazon. For example, I sometimes skim over 2-4 star ratings on products at first and just read the 1’s and 5’s. Before I buy a product I want to know why someone hates it and why someone loves it. The lukewarm product reviews pull me in only after I have all but decided to pull the wallet out. Perhaps just for that little bit of reassurance. That’s not exactly how I treat course reviews, but I do like to read about one extreme or the other. Sometimes you’ll notice that similarly rated, middle of the road reviews often parrot one another, which is okay. It cements the sentiment. I certainly don’t mind confirming previous reviewer’s opinions when I agree or have similar experiences.
With all that said, I rarely give a thumbs up one way or the other simply by course rating alone. It seems to me that the 2.5 to 3.5 range can get so muddy due to personal preferences. I like to read the text, which is the meat of the review. You just can’t judge a book by its cover. And you know what? If someone gives a course a 1 or a 5, there better be some verbiage to go with it! You can’t call your buddy and say, “Hey man, I just played the most awesome course ever” and then hang up! He’s gonna want want to hear some details! That just ain’t right!
Sometimes I’ll give a thumbs up to a review I don’t agree with if I get a sense the reviewer really believes in what he/she is saying. And of course vise versa. Ultimately though, if I’m looking for new courses to play in the area, I’ll never turn down reading through a good ol’ long winded, approaching the tldr, novel of a review. I know myself that I can get a little keystroke happy at times and I know for me, that can take some effort and time.
I have given thumbs downs as well but I’d like to think that more often than not it was for blatant drive-by or shenanigans reviews. I’ll say when I saw the totals once they were available on our profiles, I would’ve never believed I’d hit that many. That had to be in the early years. I just don’t recall hitting the down button that many times.
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