How I would fix online reviews
Hey, so online reviews suck, right? They tell you nothing. Let's say I go on google maps and i find a 5 star rated burger king. What does that mean? Does it mean it's literally the perfect burger king, that it's exceptional compared to every other one? Does it mean that the people reviewing it consider burger king, the chain restaurant to be really good as a whole? I don't know.
This is still fine for chain restaurants like burger king. You know what to expect when you go there. It's pretty much always the same thing. But what about more local fast food places? Or fancier restaurants? There's no really commonly accepted answer as to what "5 Stars" really means. For some people five stars means "exceptional". Literally the best possible thing you could have made, a perfect experience. Others just use it to mean something wasn't actively awful. That seems to be the majority opinion, actually. And, even if someone does have some deeper criteria for what constitutes "Five Stars", that varies wildly from person to person. The one to five star system is deeply unhelpful as a system of measurement, because noone has any idea what any given score actually means.
Assigning arbitrary numbers to things might be fun, but it isn't helpful. Even if you go really in-depth with the scoring, there's bound to be inconsistencies in the standards people have. Most people will always be drawn to either maxing the score out or giving zero points. Because its easy. Saying something is good or bad is a lot more intuitive and easily understandable than saying something is 6.5/10. Especially because we've sort of made it socially unacceptable to give out anything but a five. If you give something 3/5 or 5/10, a substantial amount of people will think you found it terrible. We've literally started using "mid" as an insult, to deride the quality of something. If a numerical scoring system ever had any hopes of working, it sure doesn't anymore.
So, how do i fix it? Get rid of the scoring system. Bin it. Still, we need some replacement, right? Having some sort of universal way to filter by quality is generally quite helpful, even if it is flawed.
So, what I would suggest is prewriting about ten to twenty short sentences describing feelings someone could have about the restaurant/whatever other genre of thing theyre reviewing. Put them in a list, randomize the list, and then make the reviewer pick the one that most corresponds to the feeling about their experience. This is a lot more precise than just putting a number on something. Because here, you actually have some baseline to go off of. If the reviewer selects "I enjoyed the food but would not actively recommend the restaurant" you have some idea of what their opinion is, while still getting that data point that you can use for filtering stuff. Sure, people might interpret sentences differently, but it's far more precise than just a simple number, and should hopefully get people out of the mindset of just assigning the highest possible score, because it's not entirely clear what the highest score really is. Ideally you'd write the sentences in a way that would make it hard to just pick the "best" option, making sure to avoid having some sort of "5 Star" equivalent, so the problem does not repeat.
As for how you would best do filtering for quality in this system, i honestly have no idea. But I do think it would probably solve the "5 Star"-problem and push people to actually leave reviews that mean something. Someone smarter than me can figure that out, the data on what actually people think would at least exist under this system.
You might ask "Kami, what's your qualifications? Why should we listen to you?" Uh... I don't know, I'm a Master ranked Cook in fantasy life, does that count?
Anyways, thanks for reading.