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Online Ratings Are Broken | Companies aren’t asking for your feedback. They’re begging you for data.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Technology
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My policy for giving ratings is that I don't typically rate products, but if I'm asked to rate service, I always rate 5 stars regardless of the quality of service performed. If it asks me to justify why I rated that way, I just write "Yes." and pad it with as many characters as is needed. Usually dots or problematic unicode characters.
It depends a bit. Some businesses actually need decent ratings to get going. Podcasts, AirBnB hosts, Indie developers, etc. Large corporations surely don't need my rating. So I use discretion.
I'm assuming by "need my rating" you mean "need to be rated positively" (and not "need my honest feedback so they can improve their product").
If so, I do that too, but I think the article has a point that a 5* review can now be more like a vote of "I wish more people bought this/supported this company" than "this product is really top notch". This is much more useful to companies than it is to other buyers.
Nowadays, a 5* means “This employee did ok” and a 4 or lower means, “They’re the worst employee in the history of the universe.”
Source: Work in an industry that uses this stupid system.
Funnily enough, when ratings were 1-10 people more accurately gave their feelings about an experience. 1-5 started being used to simplify reviews but it really didn’t. It just made them all useless.
1-10 is the same basic system: 9-10 means you’re adequate, 8 means you are worthless.
8 meant you’re average really. 7 meant you needed to improve drastically.
Nah, most businesses are using the top box score. 9-10 gets 1 point, any other score gets 0 points. Then they add up all the 1s and take it as a percentage of the total. If your percentage isn’t high enough, you get your pay deducted or fired.
8 and 1 count exactly the same: 0 points.
My point is was, not is. This is pre 1-5 scale, as in years ago.
I rarely rate. If harassed sufficiently, as in the case of Microsoft Teams poo-ups (lol, that typo stays), I’ll rate as low as possible.
I mostly do it because I've worked in jobs where my locations were graded on such ratings, and anything less than a 5 was unacceptable. So entering junk 5/5 ratings is my small protest against that without messing up someone's job in the process.
Same here. People don’t realize the real world impact reviews have on people that can’t change what needs to be fixed. 5 star reviews with negative wording doesn’t screw up someone’s livelihood while still getting the point across.
For a lot of those ratings, if you rate anything less than the top score, they blame it on the retailer. For example, my dad did one of those for a dealership that did some work to his car and rated the dealership high, but he had one comment about the quality of the vehicle - which is obviously not in the dealership's control. But the manufacturer came back to the dealer about it (the service guy at the dealer told him). Anything less than perfect is seen as a failure.
It's offensive to me as a statistician that companies do this.