Top 10 Worst Things About Encyclopaedia Metallum
Despite the fact that the Metal Archives is a serviceable website in many ways, I definitely have a fair few issues with the website. These reasons will be listed below. Note that I don't hate the website.From my experience on this website, as well as the normal reviews, you also get many people who think that their taste in music is supreme and everyone else is wrong. This can go both for praising or heavily criticizing an album.
Due to the fact that a lot of bands have very few reviews for an album, a single highly negative score can change the percentage drastically, causing potential listeners to turn away thanks to a few negative reviews.
Yes, the average scores often suck. Because of that, I may read some reviews and ratings, but at the end of the day, I always trust my own opinion.
I understand the aesthetic that they're trying to go for, but it honestly hurts my eyes to the point where I can only read smaller reviews and only one or two at a time.
I personally believe that there should be a way on the website for those who find it too difficult to read, to be able to have it in normal colors if one wants.
In another point, I'll go into more detail, but so many underrated albums get ridiculously high scores thanks to a few people, as well as just generally insanely high or low scores.
Yes, I've seen some of the 0% ratings. Most of them are just spiteful, biased, and unfair. If you read the reviews, you would quickly understand that they were written by people who had no idea what they were talking about, like Madonna fans trying to understand a great progressive death metal album.
I believe that no album deserves a 0% rating, as that would mean that there was not a single thing that was even slightly redeemable about it, much less an album like Master of Puppets or Vulgar Display of Power.
Take Trivium as an example. Shogun is known to be a very good album overall, possibly the band's strongest, but because a lot of elitists call them a Metallica ripoff, the average score from 15 reviews is 65%.
I'm not saying that my opinion is superior, but I find it annoying when highly acclaimed albums get destroyed by people who refuse to accept any form of modern metal or music in general.
Getting one 90% review doesn't necessarily mean that a band is 90% material. It simply means that one person really likes that album. This can lead to false impressions.
Rush and Alice In Chains are included, but Tool and Between the Buried and Me aren't. Make it make sense.
This adds unnecessary entries of bands that might only have a single EP of metal. This is a more minor complaint, though.
My two examples are BTBAM, which I personally think has enough metal influence to count and should be on there, and I think that Rush has no reason to be on the website, as they clearly never have made anything resembling metal.
I put this point at the bottom as there is a chance I could be completely wrong about this one.
Agreed. Motörhead is on the site even though Lemmy has stated many times before that his band isn't metal.
Far-right/NS bands will be heavily scrutinized and slammed based on their views, not music. Positive reviews are frequently denied despite following guidelines.
Far-left/Communist bands will receive more favorable reviews based on their views, not music, and reviews are often allowed despite not following guidelines. A moderator even said this quiet part out loud.
Horrendous bias makes this website as bad as Wikipedia. Bands must be reviewed based on music. If someone cannot separate the band's views from their own biases, they should not be reviewing.