I found myself leaving Google reviews recently for the first time in months. In a couple of cases because I was extremely pleased with somewhere I visited, on another occasion because I was annoyed and felt the need to register this fact. Inevitably the former involved five star reviews, the latter a two star review after some consideration. Once my self-indulgent cosplaying at being a sovereign consumer had ended, I felt a degree of revulsion at the rating system I was participating in. Particularly the manner in which a notional commitment to a variegated review system had given way to a crude dichotomy, in which anything other than five stars was a negative judgement about the rated entity.
Five stars registers satisfaction whereas anything below it signifiers varying degrees of dissatisfaction. It means that the ‘wisdom of crowds’ promise that reviews could be crowd sourced is epistemically worthless. It simply tracks whether people felt positively enough to endorse an entity or pissed off enough to attack it. The data does not show what it tacitly purports to show. Looking through other reviews, I was struck by how jarring it seemed to me on those few occasions when someone put three starts without a complaint. It felt cruel somehow, irrationally hostile. But this is exactly what the manifest function of reviews would expect. Three stars should suggest it’s ok, with nothing special about it, rather than a moderate attack on the entity you’re reviewing.
Mark Carrigan 