Star Rating Flaws

The cluster discusses the shortcomings of 1-5 star rating systems, such as extreme skewing toward 1 or 5 stars, lack of nuance, and poor signal for quality or recommendations, while suggesting alternatives like histograms, user-normalized weighting, or thumbs up/down.

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Comments
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#9541
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Keywords

taketake.com OR XKCD OK ycombinator.com xkcd.com CEO UI WAY ratings rating star stars reviews rated score survey restaurants thumb

Sample Comments

parrit May 3, 2025 View on HN

Star rating doesn't help here

captn3m0 Aug 20, 2020 View on HN

you'll end up with a skewed rating anyway (either 1 or 5 stars for most ratings).

Mehdi2277 Oct 18, 2021 View on HN

The systems I worked on were mainly for user curated recommendations and not public rankings. Your rating is only small part of your recommendation. A large amount of your recommendation is finding other users with similar ratings on similar content to you. If 1/5 star system leads to less ratings from other users, then system's ability to find similar users/similar ratings become worse and can negatively impact your recommendations.

phkahler Nov 21, 2014 View on HN

The stars seem to indicate popularity but not quality. They should have people rate it 1-5 and give a histogram like other places do, it's much more informative.

mikequinlan Jun 5, 2023 View on HN

One reason people give 5 star ratings is because they are asked to explain why if they rate lower. If companies made '3' the normal rating and asked for an explanation for higher OR lower ratings, that might normalize the ratings better.

ixwt Feb 6, 2020 View on HN

They used the equivalent of the thumb system. Many people give 5 stars, or 1 star. There are some that give in between. Many places consider anything less than 5 star to mean there was a problem (Uber, Amazon, reviews for phone support).

dagw Apr 9, 2018 View on HN

Or weight the 'value' of your stars by how many stars you normally give, so a 5-star review from someone who normally gives 3.5-star reviews is worth more than a 5-star review from someone who always give 5-star reviews

aw3c2 Aug 22, 2012 View on HN

This is not helpful at all. They are comparing the one-dimensional 1 to x star rating to something two dimensional.

bluntfang Mar 17, 2017 View on HN

I think you are an anomalous user. I'm not sure why you're OK with rating 1-5 stars but not a thumbsup or down. I think you're just upset because they are changing.

elijahmoore Jul 22, 2015 View on HN

Agreed here. I also think that the overall vagueness of the five-star rating system makes it hard for users to express their true opinion. Algorithms are "garbage-in, garbage-out", and I think a five-star rating response represents "garbage-in". Unfortunately it would be risky and expensive for Netflix to change its rating system at this point.