User Comparisons and Top Rated Teas

Friday, May 14th, 2010

Comparing users:

Now, when you are logged on, you can compare your taste in tea to that of other users. For any users with whom your ratings overlap for at least five teas, RateTea.net will calculate a similarity percentage. The calculation takes into account the fact that some users tend to rate more highly than others, and will give a more accurate representation of the degree to which your preferences really are similar to this user, even if you rate teas on a different scale.

Also, when logged on, the bottom of your profile will now show a list of users with whom there are enough ratings to compare your tastes. The more teas you review, the more likely you will be to benefit from this feature. If you're in a hurry to check out this new feature, you can check through recent reviews or browse the site to locate teas that have been reviewed by other users that you have recently tried or would be able to easily try.

Top rated teas:

There is great demand for using rating websites to locate the "best" products. While this concept is questionable in the world of tea (tastes are inherently subjective and one person's favorite might not even be enjoyable to another), it can still be interesting to see which teas are getting the highest ratings or the most ratings. Because RateTea.net is so young, we don't currently have enough overlapping ratings to say with much confidence which teas are considered best among our users, but we're quickly getting there.

We now have a page on highest rated teas; while it is doubtful that this page (or any page on any website) could ever capture the (preposterous) notion of the "best teas", it will give progressively more meaningful rankings as the ratings roll in. Also of interest, we list the most often rated teas...which will tend to list more mainstream teas, since these will be the teas that the largest number of users have tried. As much as these pages may be interesting to some people, we strongly recommend that you not spend too much time viewing them or thinking about them.

The mission of RateTea.net is to encourage each person to develop their own taste, not to simply seek out teas that the masses have decided are most popular! See what people like, but form your own opinions.