You know, This Post got me thinking. There's really no easy way to tell what recipes are generally liked and disliked by the crowd. Sure, e-liquid recipes has a rating system, and the comments on recipe threads help to weed out the sure losers (15% carmel cap? no thanks), but I can't tell you how many times I've mixed a "5 star" recipe from ELR, or a recipe here with one or two "this is god" comments, only to have it be unvapeable.
I wonder if it would be worth starting a diy recipe sub, where the only posts allowed are posts with a single recipe, and people could mix and upvote or downvote based on their thoughts. That way, if you sorted for all, you'd get a ranking of currently available recipes, and someone who hasn't done a lot of mixing of other people's recipes (like me, after a few trys on "popular" recipes I gave it up and just stuck with my own mixes) can have a reliable guide to what to try first.
I know we do recipe threads, but that requires looking through thread after thread of stuff, and you really don't have any comment on quality. besides, this sub has turned into a commentary on DIY, and a resource for help and support, and a source of recipes only secondarily.
Does something like this already exist? If I made it and posted some recipes, would you use it? Would you post your recipes on it? Would you make and try new recipes from it? Any other thoughts?
If this gets traction I'll start it up on Thursday, and begin posting recipes from the clone threads and the recipe threads.
tl;dr I'm thinking of making a community juice recipe rating sub. Tell me your thoughts.
Update After a longish chat with /u/daath It looks like what I was trying to do is already being done on ELR, so huzzah, I don't have to work! If you're interested in the coming features, the chat is in the comments.
Good idea, but it seems redundant. I would personally just rather see more experienced mixers be able to give a priority rating on ELR recipes. If i had more free time at work I would mix more of them and give a more in-depth rating/review. Once you get a better grasp on various flavors and their concentrations you can "eye" recipes and see if they'll be good or terrible.
Redundancy was my reason for the post, I wanted to see if it'd actually be used. Still, I think the functionality of having a more nuanced rating system than 5 stars would be useful. Upvotes by definition are more nuanced, whereas anything that has been given a 5 star rating one time is 5 star on ELR.
It's a great idea, but /r/eJuice_recipes already exists and isn't exactly active. It would take a lot of effort and a massive amount of support from the mods and regular users here to get it off the ground.
That's not to say it can't be done... there was a UK vapers sub which never took off. /u/eternal_sunshine decided to expand the scope a little and made an eu version /r/ecr_eu which now has getting on for 3000 subscribers. He did have to put a ridiculous amount of effort in though, especially in the beginning.
Good luck if you decide to go for it!
Edit: apparently I can't spell ridiculous.
> /u/eternal_sunshine[2] decided to expand the scope a little and made an eu version /r/ecr_eu
So thats why I have sometimes feeling that I'm in /r/ecr_uk. It still has strong UK userbase.
Sssshhhh... There is another thread here with a lot of talk about how bad ecr is. You being an active founder will encourage them all over!
This might give a chance to the more discreet guys to see their recipes used. The famous recipes usually become famous because the guy who mixed it wrote a 10 page essay about it, which made everybody want to try it. This isn't a jab at the fizzmustards and Botboys of this sub in any way, they contribute greatly to the community and their lengthy posts are really informative, I'm just saying I'm sure there must be some hidden gems in the monthly recipe threads.
There most certainly are =).
I still marvel @ /u/et3rn1ty's Zoochberry Cream that was posted almost a year ago. Shit is tasty.
I really like your thinking. Not sure about the best format to implement it in, but the goal is a good one.
I'm actually trying right now to identify the "best" mixers and recipes (not to take anything away from other guys! I just have to be picky as a noob), so that I can choose what I fancy and place a first order for flavors.
Another idea is to only allow rating to be done by "verified" peeps? Dunno. Might be controversial. I'm just thinking aloud.
Yeah, it seems that there's a hole in the market for this sort of thing, but I'm not sure that reddit is the best way to implement it. I've never created a sub before, so I don't know what types of tools are available to moderators.
As for flavors, bullcityvapors.com has very small sizes, like 4ml if I recall correctly, so you can order lots of smaller flavors and try it out. I would suggest finding a few clones that seem to be well liked, or that you like the original version of, and trying those out. Also, for me sour and koolada are necessities.
Funny you mention koolada. I recently was playing with different 'icey' flavors and found that I prefer TFA menthol with my one fruity mix. Koolada's mouth feel is too weird for me, and the FA menthol took away from the sweetness. Don't have any others at my disposal to play with but I like the TFA menthol so far - lends itself nicely to sweet and menthol together. I haven't written off the others, guess I just haven't found a use for them yet
When you get your list ready feel free to run it by me and I'll talk you through the goods decents bads and "oh god no"s
> Does something like this already exist?
Yes. It gets virtually no traffic.
The main issue with this type of request is that DiY'ers are in fact DiY'ers. They like to play around with their own recipes, they like to tinker, and everyone has a different sense of taste/different palates.
This makes it very difficult to get ~15-30 responses on a single recipe to really get it rated well. There are SOOOO many new recipes popping up everyday that trying to get people to mix and review them all is nearly a hopeless effort.
Just my two cents, but there are recipes here that get really really good reviews by the masses. If they are largely reviewed/commented on, and the reviews are positive, they are good. If they aren't then they likely aren't as good.
It's a little more difficult to find them here (that's why we ask that all recipes be posted in the monthly thread) but they are around and the best ones have rave reviews.
Think about it like this, just in the monthly thread here last month, there were 54 recipes posted. About 50% of them have comments, and of those that have comments, it appears as though about 10% of those were actually mixed by others and tried with feedback left.
So out of 54 recipe posts, 3 have comments from people that actually mixed it and tried it.
Speaking of getting people to try each other's recipes...
Can we get an update on your Clone-a-thon project? Is that going to be a thing? I was really looking forward to it!
it sounds good in theory, but taste is too subjective, like you said, there are recipies that some people love but you hate, whos to say you make this sub and just delete recipes you personally don't like, well now we have all the recipes that only /u/thepunkway likes, maybe you delete one that is great to everyone else but you, and now it never gets seen, I think its better to just keep looking through the already available subs and try what you think you like
I mean, I would only moderate based on if someone had followed the format, not if I personally like it. I think most flavor preferences are known by the user, including myself. for example, I mostly vape fruit and drink flavors, I still haven't found a creamy or food vape that I can take for more than a few hits. Knowing that, I'd just keep an eye out for vapes that appeal to me.
I know this might take a lot more work than you envision, but wouldn't a more detailed 'scoring system' be a wiser option to offer folk, rather than just basing these on upvotes?
Kinda like game reviewers break down game scores by gampeplay, graphics etc, then rate each element out of 5. You could (with the help of other diy'ers) create a database where we can rate juice by flavour, acidity, creamyness etc.
This in itself could turn into the vapours metacritic.
That was more along the lines of what I wanted to do. Some tweaks to ELR would esentially turn ELR into that, and then I wouldn't have to do any work, which I'm always a fan of.
Paging /u/daath ....any thoughts of updating the granularity on the rating system? I know a while back you mentioned having someone update some of the user interface elements.
Or fixing the Flavor List? I donated $5...will double it that donation and re-donate when the fix comes in...BIG MONEY!
I'm interested! What kind of tweaks do you see would get the results you want?
The real problem with ratings is that people don't rate much. Even when people try a recipe, they don't rate afterwards. And with recipes taste is subjective (to a point ofc) - but if there are 25 4-5 star ratings on a recipe, it definitely should be good. One or two? "Outlook not so good" :D
If you sort recipes by rating though, that should give you a good indication of quality - there's been a bit more work put into that part of ELR - I still need to apply the same scoring method to flavorings (sorting of)...
Point is: I don't think granularity of ELR recipe ratings would make it (much) better - What would make it better, would be if people rated recipes when they'd tried them :)
At some point there will be batch control on ELR, and then I will have a tool to ask people to rate the recipe that they mixed up! ;D I have plans!
/u/jcgivens21 > Paging /u/daath ....any thoughts of updating the granularity on the rating system? I know a while back you mentioned having someone update some of the user interface elements.
See above :) Yes, I still have plans to update the UI, but I haven't had time to work much on ELR the last few months, and my UI-guy didn't either. But it will be done :)
>Or fixing the Flavor List? I donated $5...will double it that donation and re-donate when the fix comes in...BIG MONEY!
Fixing the flavor list is the only big priority right now - but it's a ...very big task. It will take time. And again, it will be done! :D
You're one of the few donators - I really appreciate it :D But I will fix the flavor list and everything else, even if noone ever donates again - it's important to me as well ;D
I wonder if implementing some sort of incentive structure would be helpful? similar to what some websites do for people who donate. I'm struggling to think of what those incentives would be, I can't think of functionality that I want that isn't already present.
Well, there are a few things I wish ELR did, such as:
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Allow me to nest recipes. I can't tell you how many variations I have on my most frequently mixed juices mixed through my recipe list.
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History or version functionality on the recipe book, so that I don't have to have ten copies of the same recipe in case I want to tweak, or go back to an earlier version.
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Wish lists for flavors or recipes that I'd like to buy or mix.
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Flavor pages, where people so inclined can post their experiences with certain flavors. This information is mostly available already, but having it in one place would be helpful. It would be even better if that place was my mixing hub, ELR
These are a few ideas to offer premium functionality to users who rate. Say a rating of sufficient length gets a user a day or two of access to these features. If you rate again within that time frame, it goes to two additional days, etc with exponentially growing rewards. The idea being you get the people in the habit of rating, then hopefully you'll build a community around the site and people will come to enjoy trying new things and helping other people... Kind of how DIY is now.