319
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
319 points (95.7% liked)
Technology
59607 readers
3417 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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 had a product arrive from etsy fairly cheaply packaged and partially nonfunctional until I took it apart and reassembled it. 5 stars for the indie seller tho