Similarly - one of my biggest complaints about almost every rating system in production is how just absolutely lazy they are. And by that, I mean everyone seems to think "the object's collective rating is an average of all the individual ratings" is good enough. It's not.
Take any given Yelp / Google / Amazon page and you'll see some distribution like this:
User 1: "5 stars. Everything was great!"
User 2: "5 stars. I'd go here again!"
User 3: "1 star. The food was delicious but the waiter was so rude!!!one11!! They forgot it was my cousin's sister's mother's birthday and they didn't kiss my hand when I sat down!! I love the food here but they need to fire that one waiter!!"
Yelp: 3.6 stars average rating.
One thing I always liked about FourSquare was that they did NOT use this lazy method. Their score was actually intelligent - it checked things like how often someone would return, how much time they spent there, etc. and weighted a review accordingly.
theendisney · 25m ago
With averages: to have 5 stars you need a hudred 5 star ratings for each one star rating.
If one would normalize the ratings they could change without doing anything. A former customer may start giving good ratings elsewhere making yours worse or give poor ones inproving yours.
Maybe the relevance of old ratings should decline.
kayson · 13m ago
The normalization doesn't have to be "live". You could apply the factor at time of rating and then not change it.
Retr0id · 23m ago
> I'm genuinely mystified why its not applied anywhere I can see.
I wonder if companies are afraid of being accused of "cooking the books", especially in contexts where the individual ratings are visible.
If I saw a product with 3x 5-star reviews and 1x 3-star review, I'd be suspicious if the overall rating was still a perfect 5 stars.
xnx · 24m ago
I don't understand why letter grades aren't more popular for rating things in the US.
"A+" "B" "C-" "F", etc. feel a lot more intuitive than how stars are used.
NegativeK · 1m ago
We'd still get the same pressure to give an A+ to every interaction unless things were fucked.
I used to rate three stars for what "performs as expected" until I realized that it's punishing good products. Switch to A-F would result in the same behavior, except it'd be Uber drivers trying to make a living instead of noxious parents declaring that their kid deserves an A.
Take any given Yelp / Google / Amazon page and you'll see some distribution like this:
User 1: "5 stars. Everything was great!"
User 2: "5 stars. I'd go here again!"
User 3: "1 star. The food was delicious but the waiter was so rude!!!one11!! They forgot it was my cousin's sister's mother's birthday and they didn't kiss my hand when I sat down!! I love the food here but they need to fire that one waiter!!"
Yelp: 3.6 stars average rating.
One thing I always liked about FourSquare was that they did NOT use this lazy method. Their score was actually intelligent - it checked things like how often someone would return, how much time they spent there, etc. and weighted a review accordingly.
If one would normalize the ratings they could change without doing anything. A former customer may start giving good ratings elsewhere making yours worse or give poor ones inproving yours.
Maybe the relevance of old ratings should decline.
I wonder if companies are afraid of being accused of "cooking the books", especially in contexts where the individual ratings are visible.
If I saw a product with 3x 5-star reviews and 1x 3-star review, I'd be suspicious if the overall rating was still a perfect 5 stars.
"A+" "B" "C-" "F", etc. feel a lot more intuitive than how stars are used.
I used to rate three stars for what "performs as expected" until I realized that it's punishing good products. Switch to A-F would result in the same behavior, except it'd be Uber drivers trying to make a living instead of noxious parents declaring that their kid deserves an A.