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Seen Live, Resident Advisor, sexism, homophobia and electronic music’s endless problem with comments and ratings
Article en français.
Seen Live wanted to become a social archive of our concerts, festivals and club nights. Its rating feature quickly sparked controversy, before its creators announced they would remove it. More than anything, the episode exposed a persistent confusion between opening up discussion and turning everything into a score.
It only took a few days for Seen Live to go from promising new community app to a kind of digital bar-room debate for all the current anxieties surrounding the scene.
Presented as a “Letterboxd for clubbing”, the app allows users to keep track of the artists they have seen, the events they have attended and the memories usually buried somewhere at the bottom of their camera roll. You can add photos, follow other users and discover new performances. So far, the idea is actually quite appealing. Plenty of clubbers would probably struggle to reconstruct even half of the line-ups they have seen over the past ten years.
Things changed with the five-star system. Seen Live was no longer simply offering people a way to remember a night out, but a way to rate DJ sets, concerts and festivals. Following the first wave of criticism, its creators told Resident Advisor that the rating feature would be removed. Users had raised concerns about fake reviews, coordinated campaigns and attacks targeting women in the industry.
The speed of that response deserves to be acknowledged. It also shows that the rating system was not some insignificant side feature. It fundamentally changed the nature of the project.
Criticism needs words
Having an opinion about a DJ set is not remotely scandalous. Ravers do it when they leave a party, and promoters do it when deciding whether or not to book an artist again. There are plenty of reasons why a set might deserve criticism, whether positive or negative.
The public has no obligation to shield artists from criticism, especially as ticket prices continue to rise and some events are sold almost entirely on the reputation of a few headliners.
But a score out of five is incredibly poor as a form of criticism. It creates an illusion of information without really telling us anything. It does not explain whether the sound system was terrible, whether the selection made sense, whether the DJ was playing a warm-up to an empty room or had inherited an already exhausted crowd. It tells us nothing about the context, the expectations of the person doing the rating or even their musical knowledge. A live performance depends on the room hosting it and the people experiencing it. The number, however, remains attached to the artist’s name long after the night itself is over.
A written critique can be challenged, explained and put back into context. An average score starts to look objective simply because it comes with a decimal point.
Resident Advisor had already faced this question
Resident Advisor’s decision to close its comments section in 2019 is sometimes reduced to the idea that the publication simply did not want to hear from its readers anymore. The reality was much more complicated.
RA explained at the time that discussion had largely moved onto social media and that its own comments section was being used by only a small fraction of its audience. Bots, hateful messages and the amount of work required to maintain a usable space had also played a role. The publication said it wanted to explore more welcoming forms of community and redirected readers towards social media.
That move obviously did not make toxic behaviour disappear. It simply handed it over to other platforms, with their own rules and algorithms that are often more interested in engagement than in the quality of a conversation. Create Digital Music already pointed this out at the time: closing down an unmanageable space could protect some people, but abusive behaviour remained very much alive in the comment sections of major social networks.
RA had therefore not concluded that the public should shut up. The publication recognised that running a comments section also creates editorial responsibility. Opening a text box is easy. Moderating it properly requires resources, rules and a team capable of stepping in when necessary.
Six years later, RA even dedicated an entire newsletter to the richness of YouTube comments. The piece described these spaces as genuine human archives, where users connect a track to a long-gone party, a bereavement or an entire period of their lives.
Not every comment is noise. Some actually extend the history of the music. The difference lies in what a platform encourages people to do: tell a story, or hand out points.
Stars have already had very real consequences
Resident Advisor once ran one of the most influential DJ rankings in electronic music. What had started as a relatively light-hearted annual poll gradually became a professional indicator. An artist’s position in the ranking could have a significant impact on their fee.
In 2017, RA discontinued those rankings. The publication argued that they encouraged an increasingly self-interested form of competition and presented a very incomplete picture of the scene, particularly at the expense of women and artists operating outside its most visible markets. Two years later, it also removed numerical scores from its record reviews. The reviews remained critical, but no longer attempted to turn an analysis into a numerical verdict.
Seen Live therefore arrived in an industry that had already experimented with large-scale public rankings and discovered that they rarely remain harmless games between fans.
An average score attached to a DJ could easily end up being used outside the app as well. Once a score becomes public, it can be added to a press kit, checked by a promoter or interpreted as a measure of popularity. Metrics designed to summarise an experience often end up influencing which experiences are considered worthy of greater visibility.
The public already has a voice
Electronic music does not suffer from a lack of opinions. Every line-up announcement has its comment section. Clips of DJ sets circulate across Instagram and TikTok, where users discuss technique, track selection and, sometimes, what the person behind the decks happens to be wearing. On YouTube and Reddit, some discussions continue for years.
Adding another app does not invent public opinion. It simply creates another place to store it, categorise it and potentially aggregate it.
At Clubbing TV, we have been asking clubbers what they really think about their experiences for years. We publish surveys, testimonies and criticism that do not come exclusively from industry professionals. That feedback can highlight safety issues, raise questions about pricing or help explain why people stop going to a particular venue.
The most useful answers almost never fit inside a single star.
Someone explains what happened, describes the context and talks about the consequences. Several testimonies can then begin to reveal a broader pattern. Editorial work means verifying, cross-checking and presenting those accounts without turning one isolated reaction into a universal truth.
A comments section is not a poll
The democratic promise of platforms often relies on a misleading equation: “if everyone can comment, then the comments must represent everyone.”
A 2026 study by researchers at Columbia Business School suggests the opposite, showing how visible online conversations can be dominated by a particularly vocal minority. In an experiment involving Facebook posts about racial justice, comments opposing the original message generated more clicks and interactions than supportive ones. This gave antagonistic voices disproportionate visibility without necessarily reflecting the views of the wider audience.
The findings cannot tell us exactly how people would behave on a clubbing app. They do, however, remind us that an interface never simply hosts opinions. It determines which opinions become visible and can make them look like a consensus.
With an average score out of five, that dynamic becomes even harder to see. A handful of highly active accounts can damage an artist’s rating. A coordinated fan campaign can push it in the opposite direction. Without any proof that someone was actually at the event, there is not even a guarantee that the people rating a set actually witnessed it. Those concerns were specifically raised when Seen Live launched.
In a scene where women are already subjected to endless comments about their appearance, legitimacy and mixing ability, giving people another public scoreboard on which to judge them would hardly have represented progress.
So let’s drop the report card
The public should be able to say that a set was bad. People should also be able to report that an event felt unsafe or that a festival treated its attendees badly. The ability to criticise protects the scene far more than silence ever could. It becomes genuinely useful when it comes with context, serious moderation and the possibility of a response.
Club culture does not need another app to teach us that people have opinions. It needs promoters, artists and media outlets to take those opinions seriously when they are properly argued.
Listening to the public takes time and sometimes requires people to change the way they work. No five-star average will ever replace that.