At least for women rating men on OkCupid in 2009, that's wrong. http://alvanista.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/another-okcupid-st... "Women on OkCupid have rated 80% of the men as unattractive." "The median man averaged 1.5 stars out of 5"

Also, all 1, 2, and 3 ratings are seen only by the person who made the rating so there is no penalty for rating someone low.

But it doesn't matter if the ratings are distributed evenly; there will still be some variance. Users who pay to have "A-List memberships" can use those ratings to search for matches of at least {3, 4, 5} stars to restrict their matches to the more heavily sought.