Pitchfork Is Beta Testing User Reviews and Comments As It Approaches 30

As it nears its 30th anniversary, Pitchfork is testing user reviews and comments in a major shift from its long-standing critic-only model. The site will now let readers rate albums and leave comments, combining those into an aggregated "reader score" alongside the official Pitchfork score. The Verge reports: Pitchfork has historically been a one-sided affair. While it ran the occasional reader poll, there was no way for readers to directly voice their opinion on the site. If you thought that Jet's Shine On deserved better than a 0.0 (first off, you're wrong), there was no way to let the author know other than shouting into the void of this new thing at the time called Twitter. Now the site is considering letting users comment directly on reviews and give albums scores of their own. And then those scores will be averaged up into a single reader score for each album.

Enshittification

[sound+vision]

As a longtime reader, I remember their heyday 20 years ago when they had all kind of regular columns, in-depth analysis, correspondents embedding themselves in scenes and at shows.

Slowly the content began to get crappier in various ways, until about a year ago Conde Nast fired everyone but a couple of reviewers. And so the site only publishes a handful of reviews a week, and all the rest of the content is reposts from newswire-type sources and TMZ.

Now it seems they've just given up on producing content in general, hoping they can farm out the missing content to social-media types to create for free. It can never, ever, ever match what was lost. It's just going to be another YouTube comments section.

Never heard of the site, but...

[KNicolson]

...I clicked through to read that review. There was no review, but there were two YouTube videos, the first was someone talking about favourite bass lines, the second a chimpanzee peeing into his own mouth, which I suppose could be a metaphor for what user reviews are going to do to the site.

Re:

[registrations_suck]

Inver heard of "Pitchfork" before today either.

What the fuck have they been doing for THIRTY YEARS??!

Re:

[_merlin]

Well there's actually a review for Jet's earlier album Get Born [pitchfork.com], but it uses a lot of words to say very little, and gives the impression that the reviewer thinks he's a lot more clever and witty than he really is.

Because comment sections are great

[TilTacoTuesday]

Because the comments section of any website or social media platform is always going to be populated with thoughtful and rational commentary and a healthy amount of banter and meaningful debate.

Now Profitable

[Mandrel]

User comments are now a profit-centre, because AI companies will buy the freely-donated writing.