Online rating systems are broken
I’m not confident they were ever right, but recently I think I had some insights as to why online rating systems are broken, and how they can be fixed.
It’s not complicated. In fact everyone reading this will probably see that the changes I would propose are intuitive and an almost organic / natural way to think about ratings.
When I see a rating (typically of the 5-star nature) I see a single number that’s supposed to represent a company’s merit. It’s so opaque to me what that number means. Not mathematically. I can see very clearly that the number represents the average ratings across all ratings given to that company. And not conceptually. It is quite obvious that low numbers mean “bad” and high numbers mean “good”. But realistically unless I spend a good amount of time digging into those ratings (and accompanying comments / remarks) I would never realize that, for example, the company was having some issues 5 years ago and all of their 1-star ratings came from that time period. Yet every day a new potential customer reads those ratings, that business continues to suffer.
What I want is to see trend and timelines. If a company has recently had several 5-star ratings perhaps they’ve fixed the problems they were having 5 years ago. It’s not unreasonable to think a company is capable of reacting to customer feedback and fixing issues brought to their attention. Why don’t we do them the courtesy of showing this data in the ratings?
Another major problem this solves is it takes away a lot of the power from the people who enjoy watching the world burn around them. Someone looked at you funny? 3-star maximum. They didn’t serve your drinks immediately? This company is going to pay dearly for that my friends.
It makes it easier for people like me to provide real feedback to companies I want to see succeed without the fear that my mark on their 5-star average could have lasting effects for a number of years after I leave it. I don’t enjoy seeing people or businesses suffer just for a single bad experience. I’d rather not go there anymore than leave a review because it really does feel like I wield too much power over the long-term success of a company just because I had a bad experience.
I don’t know what I’d call it, but I am confident a lot of people out there treat 1-star ratings in similar ways that I do (as red flags) when you’re looking for places to go, or when traveling, etc. I just quietly move on to the next restaurant / hotel / whatever (there are too many businesses out there to waste my time on such a question mark). I genuinely don’t want others to ignore the company for years on end just because I had one bad experience.
On the flip side I’d really love to provide useful / critical feedback (and make that information available to others online who are curious), with the understanding that as time passes the company will have many opportunities to improve and thus no longer feel the repercussions of my single bad (perhaps horrible) experience. With the added dimension of a timeline and trends in the numbers I recognize that next week the company will have many opportunities to make up for my one bad experience. Who knows, maybe my review was the wake up call that gave them enough evidence to internally review their quality and fix those issues.
Finally, trend and timelines make it far less likely a business will be able to “rig” their ratings over a long period of time. It’s become quite a story recently (though many of us realized this was happening a long time ago) where people are paid to leave good reviews for companies that they may have never gone to. Run some statistics on the timeline and see that the company received a surge of 5-star ratings on June 20th? What happened for other similar companies in that area on that date? Is the surge of 5-star ratings several standard deviations outside the norm that it should warrant a footnote on the rating?
Is anyone else like me where you question yourself even more when you see that you had the equivalent of a 3-star experience when everyone else is leaving 5-star ratings? I don’t really leave reviews (mostly because of the issues outlined above), but I’d almost certainly think twice about posting a bad review on a company that only has 5-star reviews (even if those reviews are bought and paid for). In fact I might even give that company a second chance someday. I think it’s a classic “rich get richer” scenario. I imagine it can be intimidating as a reviewer when you perceive this fake reputation companies can manufacture for themselves. Leaving a bad mark on a company with a lot of high ratings can even call into question your own reputation as a reviewer.
I think by incorporating this one additional dimension of trend and timelines to the numbers it makes for a far more sustainable / reputable / natural / organic way for reviewing companies online.
