Five-star-ratings everywhere

Big corp has 10 ratings, and anything under 9 is deemed failure.

It always seems like, for most people, the middle three stars might as well not exist. Was it acceptable? Five stars. Do I want to complain? One star. There is no in-between.

Perfection is a goal,

Not a default

It’s the kind of thing that honestly should be regulated.

For hr or Uber or similar the scale is this:

5 stars = meh, expected experience

4 stars or lower = your employee literally tried to kill me

I usually save 4 stars for attempted kidnappings, its important to distinguish these things.

Remember boys and girls, a 4 out of 5 star review on any platform that doesn't allow a zero star, is only a 75% grade. Not an 80% like these hucksters imply. Thats a solid C, not a B. Let's not give in to this corporate delusion anymore

3-5 = 50% =/= 60%

2-5 =25% =/= 40%

It's a false show of satisfaction in the very least. A rotting manifestation of the soulless corporation not allowing any amount of transparency stop them from pulling the curtain closed tighter, on the, "oh fuck," side.

I think they are actually aware the curtains are silk and quite see through. I think we can all agree we've crossed the event horizon. Everything is going to get pulled in soon.

Give 5 stars to this comment or I report You for any other score as harassment!

Also I add extra gifts for any 5 star ratings!

Corrupted, it is all corrupted.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

I just don't provide ratings. You shouldn't either. Reviewing is a job. Some people are professional reviewers. Don't do free labor for corporations. Do not rate products or services.

Involving money in reviews undermines the whole foundation of honest unbiased feedback.
- The internet used to be a better place
- asking for reviews does that too. The company can choose who they ask. Reviewers being paid for their work is fine.

A few times in my life I encountered a system where 1 is labled "Satisfactory" or something similar and 5 is "Perfect" or similar.

In those cases I either refuse to rate or rate a 1 no matter how it went.

I think the system should always be so that 1 is absolute dog shit, 3 is no complaints, 5 is exceptional

I hate that 5 is anywhere from "just okay" to "amazingly exceptional" and you just can't know which it is

The lower scheme is how I rate media, for service it's unfortunately the upper one because I don't want to fuck anybody over who's just doing their job.

Small secret.

When companies compare performances they see only three categories. 0-1 star reviews are bad. 2-3 are okay. 4-5 are great.

This is because in the end the well written review you gave to the product after testing it for 100 hours and gave the product 4 stars because of the minor flaws is pretty much the same as some randomass teens hype review 5 stars.

In the end you both liked it and there is no urgent need to fix anything.

As a consumer you should just trust to the wisdom of the crowd to tell truth.

I blame management metrics that punish anyone for getting less than 5-star reviews

In the US.
God, I literally was told by my manager at my first job to tell customers, when they got a random survey, that anything less than a 10 is a 0.
Japan does 5 star ratings proper.
- That's how you know you're being setup for failure
- A three-star restaurant on Tabelog is life-changing cuisine. I’m not sure what you’d have to do to earn four, but it’s probably illegal.
- That's how our state scores conditions for learning surveys that factor into our school district "report cards." I just flat out tell kids that I proctor for "if you ACTUALLY agree with the statement, choose strongly agree." All other answers are scored as negative.
- Had to deal with similar surveys. Rating was 1-10, 8-9 was "just OK", 10 was "your ratings better be here", and anything 7 or lower was a serious issue.
- Germany (does it correctly) too. Although depending on us influence it depends.
Yeah this is why I almost always give 5* reviews to any sort of thing that's traced back to a worker unless I really feel like they need to be reprimanded for something, and how badly they should be reprimanded is how many stars I take off. This is only for the 1% who really need a talking to.
When it comes to product reviews on Amazon for example, or business reviews, I feel a lot more free to give my real opinion to help the next person.
- Every time I have to do an after call/chat survey I try to add a comment along the lines of "Your representative was very helpful, but I had to deal with too much waiting and too many chatbots to reach them. Please hire more staff."
- Everyone I've ever dealt with who thought the employee needed reprimanded was either
  A huge asshole
  completely wrong
  didn't like a policy that the employee had no say in
  was dealing with a reversible error that required training not reprimand
Nevertheless I gave 5 stars to the management because they might find out.

I think old and current newgrounds rating give a pretty clear representation of what each star mean.

It's old tho.

I seem to remember at one point, a 0 rating said "DIE IN A FIRE"
Maybe that was the scale for music?
I feel old now.

This is working as intended, though. In most cases, nobody cares how stoked you are about the product, people mostly care which flaws the product has. With a target average of, say, 4.5, the 5-star system gives you options to give +0.5 stars all the way down to -3.5, giving negative reviews significantly more weight.

relevant xkcd

This is how it works in Japan. An average of 4 stars on Google Map (for food places, at least) is considered pretty good. There's also another Japanese site dedicated for restaurants (Tabelog), where restaurants with more than 3.5 stars only make up 3%. Only 0.07% restaurants have more than 4 stars.

What if the company pays a bot farm to give 5 star ratings to everything?

Good luck convincing HR, or any of the assholes in corporate.

Who asked them?
- they're the ones who decided that anything less than a perfect score is an "opportunity for improvement" in other words "do better or you're fired".

What it is now:

5 stars = it was fine
5 stars plus glowing review = it was great
4 stars = it could have been better
1 star = terrible
1 star plus review = so terrible that I had to write something OR I'm a gigantic gaping asshole that likes to complain

"One star, the restaurant was fully booked and the hostess calmly explained that there was no room to seat me and my seventeen crying infants."
- "Three stars, the kitchen was actively on fire, a opossum was living in the cash register, and the server only spoke Norwegian, great Italian food though will be back next week."
What I love is when it's a one star with review and it's some asinine shit they failed at or something like a missing piece from a 1000 piece puzzle.
- That would be terrible to miss that one piece after doing all that work.
  But how could you ever prove it wasn't you who lost it?
Exactly! There just outstanding and crap. 1 or 5. Fuck those pinko neutralist., "non-binary" numbers inbetween. In your face, libtards!

Every single person that I get requested to rate gets five stars plus a positive comment because fuck you gig economy.

This is the issue. I am more concerned about the real impact a rating has on a real person's life than whether some future rider will be slightly bothered by a dirty floor mat.
Right if it's for corp always 5/5 but if it's on like bookworm or my blog, I feel like I can be honest, because no one is getting dinged based on my stars.
I don’t think this is actually having the effect you think it does. The people running these things still need the same number of workers in total, so all you’re really doing is contributing to the effect that OP is describing, where the gig workers getting marked down becomes arbitrary and random rather than related to whether they do their job.
The way to protest gig work is not to do business with companies that use it.
- I've worked at two call centers, both anything below a 5/4 as a 0
- In theory, sure. However in the real world there is no escaping neither the ratings or the gig economy. Every single delivery company here does it. When it is possible to choose the delivery I pick the postal service. They too asking for ratings, but at least they have regular employees though some delivery points that are stores and kiosks have a suspiciously high rotation of staff. Not every vendor uses the postal service and sometimes the only option is to order from them or be without.
  I don't have any grandiose ideas of it having any effect, but I will not participate in rating the performance of my fellow humans that are service workers. They do the job to do the job and the job is not to suck up to me. And everybody has the right to have a bad day or whatever without some manager making it even worse.
  Realistically it is better to support political parties that legislate wages and working conditions and such so that people working any jobs have a decent wage and are protected from abuse.

The only two ratings that matter are 5 and 1.

5 = Met expectations

1 = Bad

Ah, but consider
5 = Exceptional
4 = Met expectations
1 = Bad
- 4 does not meet corporate expectations and some minimum wage person who dealt with you is going to get shouted at.

I worked for AWS for a few years and one of our performance targets was customer correspondence rating, we had a target of 4.67. That means anything below a 5 brought you under the target. You also got to have a meeting with a team lead and quality lead for anything rated 3 and below.

Gotta be customer obsessed

Capitalism tries to get as much out of their employees as possible. Meaning employees fear of losing your job of you don't get the highest rating. And if you are in the USA that means losing benefits and quickly running out of money. Give employees the highest rating, unless it actually bad, because they are forced to live in capitalism.

Ok, 1. row for US, 2. row everywhere else, got it.

Don't care how many stars it is; if it's like 4.5 stars out of 1000+ reviews, I'll take it over something that's 5 stars with 100 reviews.

There's a math thing for that.... I think?
Okay found it https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/managing-results/must-do/custom-ranking/how-to/bayesian-average/#understanding-the-bayesian-average
- https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html
- I honestly didn't know that! The more I know

I prefer

bad
issues
good
great
exceptional

Except it isn't even an objective scale other folks are rating something a 5 for not being complete POS and being 5 dollars treating it as an objective scale and using a different one from planet Earth is less than useful.
- Yeah which is why I pretty much ignore stars unless someone has a rubric in their profile, or an actual review attached.
  Solely numeric reviews are basically no better than up and down votes. Good for automation or algorithms, but largely useless to humans.

I think there should be 3 options: bad, OK, exceptional.

I also struggle with people liberally handing out "11/10" for "great" and go up to 12 for "awesome".

My scale for "great" is 8, "awesome" is 9 and 10 is reserved for really special things (greay by itself + some additional bonus).

I always feel weird, like I'm overly critical, when someone else says "Oh this is great, I love this, 11/10" and I feel the same but only hand out 8.7/10.

We tried this though. "C" stopped being an average grade and therefore "okay", a long time ago.

what about using thumbs up/down and computing a five-star rating from the average?

this system can skew the average towards negative
say someone found a hair in their soup but otherwise the experience was amazing - even if they're peak karen they'd still probably give something like 3 stars, but if faced with a binary choice they'd probably pick the negative option
unless you mean up/down vote per each quality like atmosphere, food, hygine, service etc then that'd preserve the nuance imo
- no, no nuance. only yes or no.
- alternatively it skews the average towards positive: shit i found a hair in my soup! that indicates bad hygiene it the service was so good and i don’t want the wait staff to suffer! i’d probably go 3 stars but this is a thumbs down
  it all comes out in the wash: 1 hair in 1 soup, doesn’t matter… many hairs in many soups, place deserves a 0 not a 3
On steam it makes it so that universally good but not exceptional games get overwhelmingly positive reviews, but like a 3.5 star average on backloggd
- still more accurate than 5 star bullshit, infact tthe most accurate one I have seen
Now i don't know if i should upvote fpor thinking outside the box or downvote for the faults in it. Maybe if we had 3 options? But then, what if the idea only has one fault and more positives? Maybe 5 options...?
- compromise: you need to write a 1000 word review at at least a 12th grade level and we use automated sentiment analysis to set the score.
  still only as thumbs up or down though.
I like a three point rating. Disappointing, As Expected, Awesome.
- add a second rating, 1 for service, 1 for management. that way server 5* management 1*

I mean, this is a good idea, I’ll give it four stars.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This doesn’t work unless everybody agrees to use it

Correct.
With most things, like Ubers for example, there really is not a substantial dofference between an average job and an exceptional job. Like, sometimes someone really stands out as exceptional - but almost always, the one and only standard is "completed job without incident". By giving your Uber driver 4/5 stars because they didn't offer you bottled water or whatever, all you are doing is punishing some random person who did a perfectly fine job, possibly significantly impacting their ability to make money and pay their rent.
What should really happen is that these companies switch to a one star system. 1 star = completed job without major incidents. 0 stars = major incident.
- More like "completed job without an accident"

I rate your scheme 3 stars...

But no better idea?
- YMMV. Every person has their own internal mental scheme and will keep using it, no matter what. That's why I usually (a) trust large numbers (b) read very carefully detailed reviews if they are available.

For real, the fact that the former is how people have started using the five start system is crazy. Uber driver has less than a 4.8 rating? Cancel that ride, he must be a monster.

ratings are not objective, no matter how hard we try we are not creatures of objectivity. when it comes to rating other people most of us want to be nice
The Internet is to blame for a lot of it. We have all these amalgumated ratings visible, and people want their review to impact that total score. The most impact they can have is putting a review at either extreme.

Four stars always just means some people gave one star for shipping issues unrelated to the product.

It’s not the rating that’s flawed. It’s that reviews are bought now. There’s minimal real reviews.

ratings systems are dehumanizing for employees while re-enforcing entitled consumerism for the public.

I wanna rate the managers.

We do net promoter scores, out of 10. 9 and 10 are positive, 6-8 are neutral, 1-5 are negative. We get scores like "Good job, no complaints, 5 points" or "Best service ever, but my internet went down, so I knocked it down to 8 points."

This is literally just a 3-option ranking with extra steps.
- Yes, but with some studies to back it up.
- fully agreed but trying to treat it any other way punishes the people at the bottom and does nothing to the people who set up and use the system
- Sure.
  However, assuming two exceptional employees rated consistently 7-10, there's a measurable difference between an 8.2 and an 8.6.
  The alternative is 3 vs. 3.
  People also like to have options. Having a sad face, a neutral face and a smiley doesn't really cut it for pretty much anything.
  Having the option of 1 being "utter shit" and 4 being "bad but workable" seems like it has benefits.

I have a very similar system only from a subjective personal angle:

I hated it
I didn't like it
It was fine
I really liked it
I loved it

So most get 3, some get 2 or 4, only the few special ones get 1 or 5.

If you're rating people, then it's better that you just don't rate if they did a good job. Because corporations only see 4 and 5 as good, everything else is bad. So you rating someone's good performance as 3 just hurts them for doing a good job.
- Some corporations don't even see 4 as acceptable, let alone good. If I get a 4 star rating instead of a 5 at work, it's essentially the same as the person not giving me a rating. 1-3 are bad, 4 is neutral, only 5 is good.
- Oh I should have specified, this is just my own system. I agree, it wouldn't be fair to apply it to public 5-star systems no matter how strongly I feel like this is the proper way to rate things.

But "ok" implies "some issues".

I disagree. To me, "ok" means adequate and unremarkable.
- Yeah, that makes sense actually. Looking at it again, that's not really the problem. "Bad" is the direct opposite of "Good", they should be at symmetrical spots of the spectrum. Both versions have it wrong. If Bad is the worst rating, Good should be the best. I still say get rid of "some issues," it just sounds too benign to me for the second-worst possible rating, change it to "bad" and make 1/5 stars Terrible or something equally inversely comparable with "Exceptional".
- Be careful with it, though, because if someone on minimum wage is somehow linked with your less than perfect rating, corporate are going to be on their case to improve their numbers.

If I get asked to rate something it's probably going to be a 4 or a 3 unless it's bad, 5 means as good as it can be and unless a 6 gets added then it's unrealistic to give a 5

This is actually dumber. Rating is about how well the person felt about spending the money whereas everyone really wants to know how good of a whatever it is
So you really want to know it's an 85 out of a hundred on an absolute scale but all you know is how people felt about spending a certain amount of money which may not even be the amount of money the merchant is changing.
So 4 might mean people felt pretty good about spending $10 but you are being asked by Joe Bob merchant to pay 20
- I mean if I'm being asked to rate something then it's likely they're asking for a rating of the actual service and by asking they've degraded the quality of the service.

Why are 0 stars not included?

Often not able to be chosen. My company has us review the company on a 1 question survey. CEO told us anything below 7 is bad, anything above 8 is good, and 7-8 is just ignored as "fine" when they review it.
Space.
0 stars is very bad.

The out of 10 is the worst. People rate okay at a 7 and good at 8

That is consistent with US grading scales where 70% is a C and 80% is a B.
It is stupid, but it tracks.
- Wasted numbers that inflate the rating, no one uses 0 1 2 3 or even 4. bad is at 6 and horrible is 5
...and very good at a 9 and exceptional at a 10.
Sounds like a good scale to me. You need headroom for a really good experience.
- It also allows a lot of room for bad experiences, which is important.
  "They tried their best but failed" could be a 5. "This is a scam and I am lucky I wasn't caught" could be a 1. "It was bad, plus they had a bad attitude" could be a 3.
- Uh no because they rate bad at 6 and terrible at 5

Absolutely right! To somehow make sense of the current system, I tried to do statistics of reviews and see how a product or a business fairs in comparison to equivalent products or nearby businesses. The problem is that now there are so many fake reviews in addition to unhelpful human review.

No I had emotional bad time and so that means 1 star always 😡

Hm. Probably a decent idea. I’m sure people view ratings very differently amongst themselves.

I almost never give 3 stars. If it’s 3, it should probably be a 2 or 1.

5-excellent, no problems.

4-some very minor concerns, but otherwise the product does what it’s supposed to.

3-?

2-Issues interfering with the expected/full use of the product. Failure of product right out of warranty. Likely seeking tech help or a refund.

1-DOA/not as described/died soon/immediate RMA

No problems isn't excellent.
No problems is what I expect. It should be ordinary. Excellence means they went over and above.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Timely delivery of my 1972 Volkswagon clutch plates, will order again

Sir, this is a USB cable...

Honestly I wish rating systems just gave me a vertical line to place somewhere on a bell curve. Make it obvious I'm comparing against the average.

But as it is, because drivers etc. get punished for anything less than a 5, it's 5 stars

People use it like the one on the top? Never knew about it and never realized. These kind of ratings kinda have personal definitions in each ones head, so not like people even talk about it. I'm pretty sure I rarely gave anything 5 stars in my life.

the top scheme has 5/5 and the bottom one 4/5, so now we know which is better

When it comes to rating products, it seems like there's an expectation to give 5 stars. I guess because there's a sense of not only rating the product, but also the seller - and you'd feel guilty not giving full marks if the product arrived ok and did what it was advertised to do.

In terms of movies/books/games, 4 stars is my default for a piece of media I really enjoyed. 5 stars I'd only give to stuff I believe is near perfect. If I see a book that averages 3.8 to 4 stars online I know it's gonna be great. Anything beyond that is either incredible, or just hasn't had enough reviews yet!

Yeah, in rating media it is common, on products not so much.

Ratings are engagement traps, nothing more nowadays.

Megacorps, sure. But your local 1-million users distributor?

Not everywhere! This fucks over anybody who depends on ratings for job evals.

It's made by people who've never had to do customer support.

The problem is that most people rate the first way. If a place has a rating of a 4.5 and I thought they were pretty good, but not perfect, so they deserve 4 stars, I am not going to rate them. Having 4 stars is usually considered not that good, so lowering their score is not what I want to accomplish as 4.5 is pretty fitting in the context most people have. That leads me to giving 5 stars relativley often and not rating ok or just good places at all.

5 point scales are dumb because there's too much ambiguity with 2s and 4s. Since everyone has an inconsistent definition of what those mean, they don't really mean anything. Knowing that intuitively, people spam 5s and 1s because those are unambiguous.

3 or even 2 point scales are better. Dislike, Neutral, Like / would not recommend, would maybe recommend, would always recommend or just removing the middle option to push people off the fence.

A long time ago I adopted the Jinx's Rating For All Things system and it's served me very well. It is very similar to OPs suggestion.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: This thing is core to who I am. I don't want to live in a world without it. The experience was life changing.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: I really like this thing! This will be in my rotation for along time. I had an amazing time!
⭐️⭐️⭐️: I like it. Perfect in the background. If it's on, I probably will watch/listen, but I probably won't seek it out. Inoffensive. This meets but doesn't exceed my expectations.
⭐️⭐️: Not my thing, but I see why people like it. It has value, just not to me. I was slightly annoyed.
⭐️: Why would anyone like this thing?!?!?!?

I personally think the 5-star rating system is perfect. Any more than that and a lot of the mid-tier ratings become arbitrary and everything is subject to immediacy bias. Tastes change over time and how much you like stuff changes, but I've found that they rarely change buckets in this system.

I don't understand why someone cares if they like one thing "just a little bit more" than another. It doesn't have to be a competition. Do you like it or do you love it? Is it core to understanding you as a person? Did you have an amazing time?

my rating system is relative… 5 stars? only if i think its worth it… a star less that its score means i dont think it deserved that score (even for 3s etc); a star more, i think it deserved more… generally wont go less than 2 stars less unless they really deserved it

So for the instead rating, what would a dildo server under when only 2 stars? Like what would people try to even put down at that point?

Dildo shared your usage data. 1 stars would be it electrocuted or poisoned you.

I never give five stars, there is always room for improvement.

I'm not giving 5 stars unless I get a free blowjob with my order.

Ahh...but the blowjob is just rolled into the cost of the rest of the order. No such thing as a free blowjob.