What people are actually buying

Almost nobody commissioning a human review wants an accurate assessment.

This sounds cynical and is not meant to be. It is the most useful thing to understand about the whole market, because once you see it, both the pricing and the etiquette stop looking arbitrary.

The four things being bought

Attention. Someone looked, and responded, and it was about you. This is the most common one by a distance and it is the one an algorithm structurally cannot supply - not because the technology is insufficient but because its absence is definitional - the model is doing something quite specific, and looking is not it. That is the real difference between the two, rather than anything about accuracy.

A register performed well. SPH, worship, a particular kind of blunt. The buyer knows what they want to hear and wants it delivered convincingly. The assessment is the vehicle; the register is the cargo.

Permission. Being interested in this at all is something a lot of people feel odd about. A professional treating it as ordinary work - because it is - resolves that in a way nothing else does.

Occasionally, an actual opinion. The smallest group. These people usually ask for the "honest" register, and they are the ones most likely to be dissatisfied, because an honest read from a stranger about a photograph is a thinner thing than they were hoping for. The people who want a fact rather than an opinion are usually after a measurement, and no review, human or otherwise, produces one.

Why this explains the pricing

Attention and performance are labour. They scale with time and skill, not with the difficulty of forming an assessment - forming the assessment takes seconds.

That is why the price is quoted against the brief rather than listed: you are buying minutes of someone performing, and the number of minutes depends entirely on what you asked for.

Why this explains the etiquette

If what is being sold is attention and performance, then the judge is a professional performer and the request is a commission.

Which makes the etiquette obvious rather than arbitrary: state the register, respect stated boundaries, do not write the script, accept a decline. All of it follows from "this is skilled work someone is doing for you" rather than from any rule anybody made up.

The practical use of knowing this

Ask for what you want. If the honest answer is that you want a particular register delivered well, say the register and stop framing it as a request for an evaluation. You will get a better result and the judge will not waste effort on an assessment you did not want.

Do not buy a human review for a number. If what you actually want is a score you can compare against other scores, that is the automated side's job and it does it better, faster and cheaper, within limits worth knowing - Rate Cock runs both, so this is a choice rather than a trade-off you have to make between services.

Judge the result against what you were actually buying. A clip that delivered the register you asked for did its job, even if the "assessment" in it was two sentences. That was always the shape of the product - which is worth knowing before you order rather than after.

The people who come away happy are almost always the ones who knew which of the four they were buying, and wrote a brief that said so.