Binary choice leaves less room for interpretation and fuzzy ness, you either like something or you don't.
Maybe make it a really tiny box in the middle that you need to zoom in to click to encourage mostly positive or negative reviews.
- thumb down
- thumb up
- two thumbs upRotten Tomatoes goes further to emphasize the "love it or hate it" dichotomy - they display a ripe red tomato for a movie with a rating of 60 and a splattered green tomato for a movie with a score of 59.
If you want your positive rating of something to have the most impact (for whatever reason), then you need to give negative ratings to other things (even if they deserve better)?
I get it’s chicken/egg, but I feel like you can’t adjust ratings without retraining people on what ratings mean. I guess that means I think we should probably do away with the numbers and think about a more qualitative approach? Not a strong belief.
if 5 is the center of the new scale where the current grade inflation puts everything, people will not need to be retrained. Then, let them vote. You don't need to understand grading on a curve to be graded on a curve, and the grade you get is the right one.
Sorry but you don't get to set the terms of your own critique. If you refuse to listen then that impugns your character, but it doesn't make the critique invalid.
You method is flawed because some people only leave reviews when they good service or only when they get bad service. Everyone has a different reason why they do things, and what motivates them to do things. This will only work if you force people to leave reviews, and in that case your chances of getting a legitimate rating is much smaller.
You system would be better suited to de-rate the importance of people who leave a lot of reviews that are consistently skewed towards one end, but apply such a system to everyone is not going to make the results more fair.
But human brains don't work like that. We don't compare a dinner at a restaurant to literally the best dining experience we ever had or a trip to a theme park with the birth our child, so you can't realistically expect people to operate in that way when filling out a review form.
Not many people are going to think that a system which weights everything to be distributed that way is useful as a metric for evaluating human experiences.
"Absolutely awful service" / "dissatisfied" / "basically what I expected" / "positively surprised" / "incredibly excellent"
This way, most customers would click "basically what I expected", making 3 star the default.
Adjusting all reviews based on the general mean and standard deviation after the fact makes sense, though.
(you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." No, it wouldn't, that's exactly the type of situation that Gaussians know how to handle. Whatever is the average rating and whatever is the excellent rating will emerge from the collective.)
if you wish to attack my plan, I'll only listen if you offer a defense of the status quo, or offer a better improvement plan.