It's the problem with star systems, which is that we'll always have different definitions. Your 3s are living next to the other poster's 3s and mean very different things.

That said, I think the world has also suffered from ratings inflation. I tend to assume anything under a 4 means "bad" or "meh" myself.

The best rating system I have ever seen is the "best of two" system that pixoto.com uses to rate photos.

Bigger numbers don't help much either, rating systems out of 10 tend towards anything under an 8 or maybe a 7 being average.

This is exactly the way the current Goodreads rating is supposed to work (and I'm personally OK with it). But my guesstimate is that for 95% Goodreads users everything below 4 stars means that the book sucks.

How do you know that's how the rating system is "supposed" to work?

(Not parent)

If you go to rate a book on good reads and hover over each of the the 5 stars, here are the "title" attributes of the links:

* title="did not like it"

* title="it was ok"

* title="liked it"

* title="really liked it"

* title="it was amazing"

Interesting, thanks. I use the app mainly, and it doesn't have those descriptors as far as I know.

I think it's interesting to have the middle/neautral rating described (3 star, middle of the range available) as "liked it" (a positive response).