I feel it’s the special, unknown and sometimes unpopular modules that make Rack most interesting.
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I agree that some of those are greap “spice”, but for the “meat and potatos” modules in almost every patch, there’s a few plugins that most people return to again and again, because they’re great, and I think newbies would find that knowledge very valuable. Us old times just know, but they don’t.
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I think many great modules will be overlooked.
For example most people turn to the mindmeld mixer, which is great, no argument there, but I personally would advice (and use, myself) the Nysthi mixers, which are also great.
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I would bet you that if there were any sort of rating system Nysthi would do just fine. Because for all their quirks those modules are good.
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It does raise a good point though: Highly liked (great) is not necessarily the same as newbie friendly, so maybe my rationale is not quite as profound as I thought, in terms of having newbies in mind. Hmm…
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I’ll end my contribution to this discussion for now, because it’s not really that important.
I just feel a vote or star or like system for modules is something I quite dislike, and I’ve given a few reasons why.
But I prefer making music with my favorite modules over being engaged in discussions.
Many of those are indeed Nysthi, especially the ones who take some time to get into, and a lot of Squinky gets its amount of use to. And then, loads of others, too 
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I’ve gotten more cynical with age. It is my experience that any gameable system will be gamed. It only takes one gaming to ruin the system. Even such things as “search engine optimization” are gaming the system.
That’s probably all I have to say on the topic. I also enjoy making music and working with modules more than talking about them… but I can be wordy in my old age 
I’ve worn so many hats over the years. I have spent much of my time reactively acting when someone games the systems I am responsible for from a security, reliability, assessment or management perspective.
I feel it’s the special, unknown and sometimes unpopular modules that make Rack most interesting.
And I’d just love to find out what some of those are!!! 
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Just pick the ones with the least likes
While I totally understand that „module discovery“ hasn’t been solved yet in VCV, I also think that a „like system“ comparable to eCommerce, Social Media is not the way to go.
Someone’s most liked and most used module is another ones least used. Because everybody makes music differently where as on Amazon a large portion of the audience seems to be looking for (or is manipulated towards) „the same product“ in a category (one that has a solid price-performance ratio and good enough durability). As most modules are free, there’s is no risk involved in trying out something to see if it works for you, so social proof is not necessary in a general sense.
So much about module discovery is trying to achieve something (let’s call it use case for now) and looking for a module that can do exactly that, or find a way to patch up a couple of them to be successful.
That is why the solution imo opinion is (sorry if it’s a longer elaboration):
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editorial - authoritative content (maybe produced by this very community) around the „modules to try first“ - the bread and butter. There could be a vote for that, but when it comes to the simple „getting started stuff“ I think there’s agreement as to what that would be. This would cover a lot of the initial confusion about what to check out first.
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the library getting better at presenting a small set of modules based on more elaborate (think descriptive) search terms. Right now the tagging system does help but it’s not enough especially because you have lots of multipurpose modules.
Proposed features:
- search by module name and display matching modules only
- add more tags in general
- let devs add additional meta data like „this envelope is good for snappy, plucky sounds“ to help with use case based discovery
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this forum continuing to amaze people with the great solution people come up with if someone asks for module advice on a use case
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the module browser letting you build multiple collections of modules instead of just one for favorites. Think of lists like „Generative Sequencing (that will certainly include modules not tagged „sequencer“), fav Chord Generators, etc.
And then let people share this lists/collections so we can create useful discussions around them and guide newer people in a way that is much less opinionated I hope than a liking system.
We do have module selections already, so maybe we can tie those into the module browser somehow, but that’s up to more technical people to decide.
Anyway enough with my thought dump. Maybe there’s something in there that will move things forward, maybe not. I am definitely open to give this more time and attention to figure something out collaboratively.
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I would like to see effort go to improving the browser search capability since we are all wanting to improve discoverability. I can seldom find modules based on capabilities in the browser search. I can’t even put in the module panel name (such as “QNT”) and find the module. One thing about fuzzy search logic is that a whole lot of fuzz is returned. I would like a literal search capability with double quotes. I like the idea of allowing more metadata descriptive terms that the developer could choose from. Maybe multi-word tags or metadata entries, like “music theory”. These things are very doable with little risk of someone gaming the system. Maybe boolean operator search strings?
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here not, but on the major online retailer sites that behavior is very common…
If the desire is to somehow quantitatively and objectively indicate whether a module is “beginner friendly”, there could be a module complexity factor such as the total number of jacks and parameter controls.
For the folks who think a like system won’t work, I’d really suggest checking out the TONEX portion of the site for IK Multimedia’s guitar rig profiler. Thousands of user created modules, users can like them, users can then search on name, author, filter on type, sort on likes. It’s simple but effective. No one’s gaming the system because why would they, the modules here are free and the user base is relatively small. Comparing to Amazon or Social Media isn’t entirely valid because the VCV Rack library doesn’t have the traffic Amazon or Instagram do, and content creators aren’t making money off of ad revenue by having top-liked products, or selling their wares unless it’s a paid module, and honestly, the user-base for paid modules is still pretty small and I trust our developer community not to pay for likes.
Anyway, here’s the TONEX site link. Check it out for a similar system. https://www.tone.net/tonex
For example, I think Meander is a great example of a free module that would get a ton of likes and more users checking out if they knew it existed. I only knew about because I was frequenting the forums more regularly when it was being developed. If I just download VCV Rack 2 today, how would I find it? I wouldn’t know it existed.
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And yet 14,316 people have found Meander. About 4,000 of those are new after V2.
But, I understand that a like system is what you want, and I respect that.
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ppl are ignoring some thing here. In no particular order:
it’s true that modules have different uses, so “2 stars” would mean even less here. But I find the amazon reviews more useful than the stars. So in the case of VCV, if someone said of an LFO “I was looking for an LFO with multiple phase outputs. There are a bunch, but this one seems to use 10X the CPU of the others” that would be useful to know. Or “I was looking for a filter that was smooth and Moog-like, but this one is super aggressive and seems to have non-harmonic tones in the output” would be useful to people looking for a moog like filter and to ppl looking for something aggressive and off-beat.
fwiw, sometimes I buy thing from amazon for uses far from what the were intended for, but if I see multiple comments that say “I ordered X, but got Y instead” I would probably avoid it.
It has long been suggested that the “downloads” number is just an indication of how long one has been in the library. Theory is most/many subscribe to all modules. Maybe this has changed since the last time it was discussed.
Just yesterday I was looking for a movie to watch on TV. I didn’t want to spend forever on it, so I picked three from the description and looked up reviews on them. Ended up getting pretty much what I expected.
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For reference, Sound on Sound magazine always reviews Eurorack modules. I subscribed for 30 years, but canceled because they don’t cover VCV. Here’s a randomly selected review: Cwejman Synthesis Modules: Part 1.
It makes sense to have reviews for commercial hardware often costing $hundreds per module.
Free software still requires an “investment” of several hours to determine if it’s good or not. I don’t see a difference. Oh, and the movies I was selecting yesterday were all free, too. But I didn’t want to watch the whole thing first to determine if it was terrible.
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A rating system based on what people are actually using is a good idea I reckon (much better than a star rating system at least). We already have a ‘Sort by: Most used’ (by the individual user) in the module browser so some similar kind of ‘Sort by: Most used (by the community at large)’ could be interesting. This method would mostly avoid issues related to both manipulation of results and of people mainly being motivated to review things they feel negative about.
The downside I guess is it could lead to lots of people only using what everyone else is using…
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