Should We Keep Star Ratings?

 Whenever people review works of fiction or other products, they often assign a score to the work in question- a letter grade, a scale of one to ten, or one to five stars, among others. The star rating system is the most common for user reviews, but unfortunately, it has resulted in the stars losing much of their meaning.

Theory Vs. Practice

To begin with, let's go over what the stars mean in theory.

• A five-star rating means that the work is anywhere from excellent to nearly perfect, or at least has no major flaws, and so comes highly recommended.
• A four-star review means that the work is fairly good, but flawed enough that it does not deserve the fifth star.
• A three-star review is average, neither great nor terrible. Most people with discerning tastes will probably want to look elsewhere.
• A two-star review means that the work is subpar, but not terrible enough to deserve one star. It's safe to say that this is not a  recommendation.
• A one-star review is for utterly terrible works that should be avoided at al costs.

In theory, this is a good system. The three middle ratings can be good picks for people who are more ambivalent about the work, which might not be possible in a simple like/dislike system. For example, if you generally recommend the work but acknowledge it has flaws, you can choose a four-star rating, or a two-star review if you dislike a work but don' t think it's worthless.

However, in practice, you may notice that many sites with user reviews have popular works average between four and five stars, even if the works aren't necessarily good to excellent. 

A five-star review is generally given to any work the reviewer likes, including those that might get a four-star review if they were reviewed "objectively" under the above scale.

A four-star review is much less common than the five-star reviews, but somewhat more common than the three- or two-star reviews, and is given to works the reviewer considers decent.

Three-star reviews are relatively rare and are given to below-average works. It's just like how in many American public schools, a C, which is in theory an average grade, is usually given to below-average students.

Two-star reviews are slightly more common than three-star reviews, and are given to works that one greatly dislikes, but doesn't want to give a one-star review for (see below for more).

One-star reviews are the standard rating for any work one hates, even if they aren't necessarily this terrible. As the only low rating immune to the grade inflation, they're given out frivolously enough that some people may opt for a two-star review instead to be taken more seriously.

Not everyone follows this rubric, but the majority of people who write user reviews seem to, which tend to result in the general consensus on what each rating means changing accordingly.

Reasons For The Trend

I can think of a few reasons for this trend of favoring ratings at the end of a scale over the three in the middle.

Selection bias is a major factor, since people who leave user reviews tend to feel strongly about the work in question. On sites in which the reviewer has to have read/watched/played the work in question, most of the people who have done so are those who are drawn to the work, rather than critics whose job requires them to review every product that comes across their desk. As a result, most reviewers are people who would like the work anyway, although particularly disappointing works can get negative reviews from people who were let down.

Related to the above, some people may decide to give high or low ratings to maximize their impact on a work's average rating. To use an example, let's imagine that you didn't like a work, then went to the work's page on Amazon.com and saw a single five-star rating for the work. If you were to leave a two-star review, the average rating would fall to three and a half stars, but a one-star review would pull the rating down to three stars. Obviously, the more ratings there are, the less impact your rating will have(for example, if a work has nine five-star ratings, a one-star rating probably won't even knock it down to four and a half stars)but from a mathematical standpoint, one- and five-star reviews have the most impact.

Lastly, many reviewers more readily give out one- or five-star reviews than professional critics, due to going with their gut feelings rather than following a rubric with objective criteria, often resulting in flaws being judged more harshly than they might otherwise be. This isn't to say that such reviewers are wrong to feel the way they do; it's just that reviewing based on those feelings tends to result in a review that's less likely to be useful to the average consumer, especially if the rating is higher or lower than the work actually deserves.

Conclusion

While star ratings can help reviewers show how much they like the works they're reviewing, the grade inflation among user ratings has resulted in each rating losing much of its meaning, and the system becoming less useful as a result. As a result, I would suggest replacing the rating system with a simple thumbs up or down system, much like how YouTube has long since done away with the star ratings in favor of likes and dislikes. Perhaps most works will have mostly positive ratings, as is the case with most popular YouTube videos, but this is a simpler way for fans to express whether they like or dislike what they are reviewing without forcing people to wonder what each star rating actually means.