In my perception that wasn't the idea of any company, but companies just decided to adapt to how the majority of users use the 5-star rating system: basically like a one-star-system, where 5 means "all ok" (1 star), and 1 star means "crap" (0 stars), and in between there's a wasteland nobody uses anyway.

I think it started to go wrong on eBay back in 2000. People gave any seller overly enthusiastic comments on any sale that somehow made its way to their door, as if that was something special and totally unexpected. And the sellers gave best ratings to buyers in return. Soon, both expected the other to provide a perfect rating for any transaction.

Wonder if it started before that to be honest. It's pretty common knowledge that game reviews have ridiculously inflated scores for example, with anything lower than 70% being seen as bad and people not bothering with anything under 80-90% when choosing what to buy.

So perhaps the average for a review score/rating has just steadily crept upwards over time, til the scale collapsed into a two choice system with 'bad' and 'great' being the only options.

Coincidentally, the inflated subjective scores from game reviews tends to match the percentage of players that rate a game as "recommended" on Steam.

The median rating on Steam is about 80% positive (meaning 80% of players who rated it would recommend it). A game with a 70% Steam rating tends to be mediocre.

It's interesting that even though a rating system where you choose between "recommended" and "not recommended" is much less subjective than trying to rate a game on a scale from 0-100, in aggregate, you get similar scores.

Yes, gaming scores were inflated indeed. This gaming magazine from the 90s called Hoog Spel [1] never gave ratings to games. Instead they gave a summary of plus and minus points. Such a summary takes slightly more time to read (but not a lot) and gives the reader a good idea on the positive and negative sides of the story.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoog_Spel

It was eBay indeed which introduced me to this system. eBay is just a symptom though. The problem is fundamental, that a rating does not tell much. Because what you rate 3/5 someone else rates different. Its the same with movie reviews and game reviews. You'd need to read the review in order to understand it. I do that on e.g. Amazon (and my conclusion is often: this writer is clueless).

> companies have decided that 3 = Bad, 5 = Acceptable.

Does Uber actually give instructions on how to rate? Does it say a normal, acceptable trip should be 3 or 5? What would a really great trip be anyway, perhaps if the driver says "hey, I just won a lottery and I'm celebrating with my passengers, take $10k", or perhaps something sex related?

Once Uber kicks out all the below-average passengers / drivers, will they take into account that the average will be pushed up for those remaining, so they will need to do further rounds of kicking?

They do give pretty clear instructions, and say that a ride that didn’t have any problems should be rated 5 stars.

Yes, 3 stars is "disappointing", for example.

In that case, I'm unclear why the prior-mentioned girlfriend selected the "disappointing" option.

I can't check myself, I've never used Uber. I've been unable to sign up due to some problem where my "email address is already registered", which apparently can't be fixed. I could just use a different email, but I don't really want to deal with a company that has such issues.

May harken back to the adoption of net promoter scores. Back then so many companies were giving such terrible service that "average" was bad. So then every interaction needed a 10 out of 10 so you could secure those promoters. So many people came up working at companies where anything below a 9 or 10 reflected bad on their work it doesn't surprise me that max scores became the new norm. You don't want to get any fired, do you?

NPS is so horrid. I get ticket responses sometimes with sig lines explaining that anything not a 9/10 in the survey counts as bad for them, and it's so embarassing for the organisation that they have to do this.

Ugh, I’d hate to have this kind of system when providing internal support. I like saying things like “The reason why your account isn’t letting you do anything is because you haven’t completed your mandatory training”, without having to spend too much time sugar coating it.

Plenty of people see 1 star = not free, 5 = free