Why anything less than a five-star rating means failure online

The five-star rating system is broken, and experts have ideas on how to fix it

Today's expression: Rave about
Explore more: Lesson #419
November 25, 2021:

Leaving a five-star review has become customary for any experience that is excellent, good, average, or even acceptable, and anything below five-stars means terrible in the world of online reviews. As consumers, this system isn’t helpful in identifying the true high performers, and it makes it difficult for people or businesses to stand out from the crowd. Plus, learn “rave about.”

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Can I get a five-star rating? Why anything less than perfection is failure online

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, thanks for joining us for Plain English. I’m Jeff. JR is the producer. And you can find this lesson at PlainEnglish.com/419. Sign up for a free membership right from the home page. If you’re already there, then you know where to find everything. Your dashboard is a great place to start; the Libraries at the top of the page can also help you explore older lessons. Like a fine wine, they get better with age, right? PlainEnglish.com

Coming up today: Why do we always give five stars? Because a five-star rating doesn’t give you five choices, that’s why! On most online platforms, there are only two choices that matter: five stars, or anything else. We’ll talk about what that means, and we have a few ideas for how to fix the system, too. The English expression we’ll review is “rave about.” And we have a song of the week. Let’s get started.

When 4 stars is failure

My Uber driver from the Cincinnati airport was driving an old car that smelled. The backseat was uncomfortable. The driver was talking on an earpiece the whole time; his seat was reclined to a point where he couldn’t possibly be responsive to an emergency on the road. It was an unpleasant flashback to the days of taking normal taxis. As I was about to get out, the driver, who had not spoken to me the whole time, told me (he didn’t ask me—he told me) to give him a five-star rating.

I was generous, so I gave him four stars. In my mind, the correct rating was a 2. However, in the world of online reviews, five stars means excellent, good, average, or acceptable. Four stars means terrible. Three stars means the person should be in jail. I exaggerate—but only by a little.

Somehow we’ve gotten to a point where five stars is the only acceptable rating. I recently stayed in an Airbnb in Hungary. There was a big sign telling me, the guest, that Airbnb considers anything below a five-star review to be a negative review. Therefore, the host was telling me, a five-star review was expected as long as nothing was wrong. I was happy with my Airbnb experience, but I didn’t love being told to give a five-star review. Still, it’s not the host’s fault: indeed , platforms like Uber and Airbnb do punish providers that earn anything less than five stars.

The five-star rating system is supposed to be better, or more granular, than just a thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating system. But it’s clearly not. The only two options are five stars and not-five-stars. As such , this system does do a good job of identifying the truly bad actors. That driver in Cincinnati got four stars; that’s terrible and that’s what he deserved.

Where the five-star system fails is in differentiating between good and excellent, or between mediocre and good. That’s not always very important. The stakes are relatively low when booking an Uber ride; if the driver is safe, who cares if your five-minute ride is average? Did you really need that bottle of water?

But sometimes we rely on platforms for more serious things. Upwork, Fiverr, and Clutch work similarly. On those sites, individuals and businesses hire other people to do work for them. It could be simple like designing a logo, or much more involved. I’ve engaged contractors on Upwork with full five-star ratings; as soon as they start working for me, it’s clear they’re well below average. It costs me money and time to dismiss that worker and then find someone adequate. On platforms like that, small differences in quality matter. Truly good performers can’t stand out from the crowd if every acceptable job gets five stars.

Reviewers struggle with the distribution of ratings and the lack of definitions. What should be the difference between four and five stars? What does three-star service look like? This isn’t well-defined anywhere, so we don’t really have any guidelines to tell us when to give four stars and when to give five.

We also want to be nice to people we deal with. If someone does a good job—not great, but good—I still feel some social pressure to give five stars because I like the person and I want the best for him or her. These two factors—the lack of definition and the social pressure to be nice—they work together to push the average ratings upward on most platforms.

What can we do as consumers? Let’s say I’m looking to book an Airbnb. There are times when all I need is a bed and bathroom. I have plans to do other things out of the unit all day and I don’t care much about the accommodations. Other times, I know I’ll be working in the unit or spending a lot of time inside. In those cases, I want something better. But if every unit is rated 5 stars, then the ratings are not helpful.

The best option for me as a consumer is to read the text of the reviews, especially the long ones. From skimming positive and negative reviews, I can get a sense of what people specifically liked. Sometimes what they don’t say is also important. If everyone raves about the location, but nobody says how comfortable the bed is…well, that’s also good information.

Bad reviews, ironically, are a good guide, too. I once read a one-star review for a unit that was on the third floor of an old building. The reviewer gave it one star because there wasn’t an elevator. That’s good information, but if that’s the worst thing about that unit, I’ll take it! (The stairs were in the description, by the way.)

Most platforms give the owners a chance to respond, too. The tone of the response can be a good guide to your experience. I prefer owners that are polite but firm. If an owner gets into an ALL-CAPS online shouting match with a former customer, then I stay away. A little bit of snark is okay, though, at times. On the flip side, if the owner is too apologetic, then I also start to wonder.

This strategy helps me as a consumer, but it doesn’t solve the problem of online ratings overall. A group of researchers posted in the Harvard Business Review about ways to design star ratings so that, taken together, they’re more useful for consumers. Here are some of their ideas.

First, instead of just showing a star rating, platforms should show where that rating falls in the distribution of similar providers. If an Uber driver is rated 4.5, is that good? There’s no way to know unless we know how that compares to all other drivers in the area. If you place that on a sliding scale, then we’ll know if 4.5 is excellent or terrible.

A similar idea is to tag providers who are within the top, say, ten percent of their peers. Airbnb does this with its “Superhost” title. But both these ideas are just different ways of displaying the existing flawed ratings scale.

Another proposal is to publish guidelines on what each star means and then remind reviewers about the distribution of their reviews. For example, let’s say JR and I are both Uber riders. He always gives 5 stars, no matter what. I like to give three stars for an average ride and four stars for a good ride; I only give five stars if the service is exceptional. The system can remind JR to use three- and four-star reviews more often and remind him about the definitions.

Over time , a system can give more weight to customers who use the full scale. A ratings system like that would give my ratings more weight because I’m known to use the full scale. That would bring the average rating down from the stratosphere.

There’s also no reason why reviews have to be so one-dimensional. The reviews could ask things like, “Was the ride comfortable?” Or, “Did you feel safe?” Or, “What did you like or dislike the most?” The questions could be generated randomly so you don’t always see the same question each time. This would allow a consumer to answer the question truthfully without the social pressure to give five stars.

In fact, Airbnb is starting to do that. As a customer, I found myself much more willing to leave honest feedback in response to a specific question. It felt much less judgmental toward the host who, honestly, did a nice job. Now I just hope that feedback can be used to help future travelers.

Which is worse: honest or fake reviews?

A lot of attention has been paid to fake reviews, especially on Amazon. Amazon is a whole other story; I heard a podcast once about Amazon sellers that harass reviewers who leave anything other than five stars. But set aside the fake reviews…it’s these legitimate five-star reviews for less than five-star service that I think are more misleading.

The other way star ratings are manipulated is when businesses survey their audience. Have you ever gotten a quick question asking, are you happy with this or that service? If you rate it highly, they send you a helpful link to leave a review. If you rate it negatively…yeah, you’re not getting that link!

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Expression: Rave about