I was thinking it might be helpful if we could “Like” our favorite modules in the VCV Library (bonus points if this could be done in the VCV Rack browser) and then sort by Likes on the VCV Library site. I think given enough time, some of the top modules and hidden gems would rise to the top.
There’s already a “Favorite” gesture in VCV Rack when looking at your library (right-click on a module and see it on the menu). It helpfully gives a yellow border to modules you’ve so indicated. I don’t see any indication that this bit is or isn’t sent to the Library servers, though.
That would certainly indicate some measure of the utility those modules have to the masses, so this might be a fairly high quality signal.
But I can understand why the keepers of the Library might hesitate to implement more nuanced relevance scoring; once you start such reordering, all manner of awful behavior can creep into your userbase. “Please patch, Favorite, and share my modules!” <shudder>
Having reviews has come up before. In general people hate that idea. I think the idea is that the library and community should be a safe place where anyone can come any make module without getting their feelings hurt.
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A like system that gives us e.g. zero to 5 stars doesn’t say anything about why peple liked a module or not.
And modules change over time, so what to do with likes given on previous versions of a module?
And who really needs the top 10 modules? For me, exploring the unknown brings a lot of fun in VCV.
I think, the vcp challenges here are far more helpful than a like system 
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Simplest solution would be to let people add their own multiple custom tags in the library then they could give modules one to five star tags and assign their own weightings only viewable in their own rack library.
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I’m coming at the request from using IK Multimedia’s TONEX. In a matter of days, the library of freely available TONEX captures was in the thousands. There’s over 3,000 user captures and it’s been out a month!
But, you can start to get a feel for what models the community feels are good by just checking how many likes a given module received. Doesn’t mean that models with fewer likes are bad, could just be that they are newer, but you start to get a feel for “oh, this one has been up for 2 days and has 12 likes already, let me check it out” and sure enough, they’re usually pretty good.
No system will be perfect, but where, as an end-user, you’re presented with hundreds or thousands of modules and no time to check out all of them, some kind of system based on community input that says “these are some of our favorite modules” in a sortable format, seems like it would be beneficial. Maybe just a “Filter tag, sort by likes…oh that one I haven’t checked out yet and seems popular, let me open it up!”
That’s where my head is at. It’s not about hurting anyone’s feelings or even writing reviews. Just “I like this one” and done. That may be just to say “thanks” to a developer, or it may mean you really love the module. Aggregated out across hundreds or thousands of users, and I think a picture would emerge of favorite modules that could help newbies or casual fans of VCV figure out which modules they want to try out next.
That was my thinking behind the request.
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Thanks for taking the time to explain your thought process. I always find that interesting and helpful.
Yeah, I have never understood why people here don’t want anything like that. As a consumer I find user reviews / likes incredibly useful for amazon products. Yelp user review - some value if you read the text? Metacritic and Allmusic for great music, but those aren’t mainly user generated reviews.
Seems like reviews or likes is pretty ubiquitous out there in the real world. I guess amazon probably wouldn’t put them in there if they didn’t help sell stuff?
But I don’t think we will ever see that here.
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I would be really opposed to this idea. I think Amazon, Google, even Ranking the Stars have introduced a world view where most likes equals best. This has led to a new form of competition where it’s about who can motivate most people to like your product, and not about quality.
I am happy we are left to ourselves to find out what we like, and what not, in the vcv community.
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Indeed, I share that sentiment 100% . Many ‘reviews’ are fake/bought/coerced/whatever, so the number is immaterial. Also, people do not usually review things unless dissatisfied to some degree in my opinion, so a huge number of positives and no negatives is also a red flag. At least number of likes never seems an indication of quality to me, or so very rarely as to be mostly useless.
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I don’t think it’s right to compare module ratings with ‘finished’ media products like albums or movies because modules can evolve.
Some way (with an opt out) of logging the number of module uses per rack per week might be informative and maybe even helpful at VCV towers to determine module trends.
I ‘liked’ your post unironically
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I kind of “Like” this
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By and large I have found “liking” systems to be essentially useless to me personally. It seems to perform pretty well in this community though. So, I use it here and on FB with family but nowhere else.
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For me personally, “liking” a post here is me saying either “I agree.”, “I hear you.” or “I respect your opinion even though I disagree.”. I think it is good that there is not a “dislike” button here. It is easy for these types of things to divide people more than unite people, in my personal opinion.
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Well the discussion was about the library. Liking a post is a different thing, nothing against that of course.
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I do like seeing the “Popularity” number in the Library, although I’m not certain what it means. I assume it means total unique initial “Add” or “Subscribe” at the Plugin level since the plugin was created. I hope it does not reflect version update downloads. But, I only look at my plugin numbers, rarely others’.
Regarding the thought around fak/bought/coerced reviews, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem here. VCV Rack is pretty niche (music creators, who also like synthesis, who also like Eurorack/modular, etc.) and I don’t think anyone’s getting really rich selling modules. Most are free anyway.
I’m really just advocating for a method of “help me find the good stuff when I do open VCV rack - it can be quite overwhelming.”
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I’m probably giving too much thought to this, particularly since it is extremely unlikely to happen, in my opinion, but… It would be fun to develop such a system and by “fun” I mean “extremely challenging”. In my opinion, a successful “like” system has to be “un-gameable”. And I am not sure that is possible. But, to just make it somewhat un-gameable would be a big chore. in the minimum, it would need to only allow one vote per person per module. That means keeping track of a lot of stuff. But it also would have to be immune to bots or scripts (or modules!) . It would need to be equally available for open source, commercial and VCV modules. There would probably have to be an opt-out capability and the ability to distinguish those to the user.
I just personally think that there is a lot more important stuff to be done than a like system. But, I’m just one opinion.
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I kind of agree Ken and I think there’s more important stuff to do. But the challenge of newbies of finding the good stuff to initially focus on is real I think, and it can be quite overwhelming. Also, I agree with you that, at large, un-gamable systems are a pretty hard proposition, but I believe the point of the person before you was, that the Rack community doesn’t seem very amenable to gaming and the incentives for doing it are quite low, and therefor it’s not very likely to happen, and I agree with that. I think where I come down on this is: I think it would be a worthy, simple and cheap experiment. If people don’t like it after a couple of months it can just be turned off. No harm done.
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