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posted by [personal profile] emperor at 06:17pm on 12/04/2017 under
Star ratings have been in the news recently - firms like Uber essentially considering anything less than 5/5 as a complaint. This reminded me of a time a B&B owner who I'd given 4/5 on Tripadvisor was hurt enough by said rating that they grumbled at me about it when I tried to make a repeat booking!

I'm quite a keen tripadvisor user - both in terms of using it when trying to find places to eat/stay and writing reviews (110 reviews written, which have garnered 51 "helpful" votes). But it's quite rare for me to give somewhere a 5/5 rating. Even taking into account the fact I mostly go places that are already quite well-rated, I've given only 20 5/5 ratings[0]. It seems to me that in the tripadvisor case (which is distinct from the Uber one, I think), a "anything less than 5/5 is a complaint" model would render the rating system much less useful.

Perhaps I am in a minority, but to me 4/5 is, as the hover-text says, "very good"...


[0] 1x1, 2x2, 21x3, 65x4, 20x5
There are 2 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
mtbc: photograph of me (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mtbc at 05:57pm on 12/04/2017
I wholly agree. Even referring to how sites like eBay and Amazon themselves describe what the stars mean, 4/5 is clearly not a complaint. If someone puts a couple of transistors in an envelope to me and they arrive within a couple of days and work then that's agreeable but hardly excellent in any sense; I'd like to reserve the highest rating for vendors who go beyond the norm.
jack: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] jack at 08:25am on 13/04/2017
I think it's unfortunately possible to think that it would be more useful if we used a wider range of stars, and yet think that's pointless if everyone else uses the "4 = bad / 5 = good" model. I assume trip advisor hasn't gone to that point *yet* but it seems like inflation generally keeps happening unless there's something holding it back.

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