Intelligent Ratings

Imagine: You're perusing an app store, looking for an app that does a specific task, and after a little searching, you find one that seems promising. A quick examination of the app description gives you further hope until you realize that the app only rates two out of five stars. Further investigation reveals many, many one- and two-star ratings accompanied by individuals' complaints about how the app didn't do what they wanted it to. Many reviewers trashed the app for not doing something that was specifically stated as a technical limitation. In addition there are the usual comments that are confused, unintelligible, or just, plain gibberish.

For me, this is an increasingly common scenario. In a positive review, a single word followed by an exclamation point ("Excellent!") can be sufficient. Potential users may assume that the app works exactly as advertised with few or no bugs. Some people don't seem to understand that negative reviews don't work the same way. "Junk!" is not useful to anyone. Certainly the developer won't know what to fix, and potential users won't know if the app functions poorly, or if it is simply built along the lines of those ubiquitous "fart" apps.

So, I've come to the conclusion that the problem with 5-star rating systems and reviews from strangers is there are too many morons in the world. Mandatory education programs have trained these idiots just enough to (badly) express their simpleton points of view, but not enough to do actual critical thinking before they begin to type. In fact, I rarely read reviews anymore because it is too tedious to separate the really usefully comments from the chaff. I think Google's +1 button offers some hope here, as does the Facebook "like" button, but only if they offer a -1 or "dislike" button as well.

For years Facebooks users have been clamoring for a "dislike" button, and Facebook has steadfastly refused to provide it. Personally, I've always maintained that a "dislike" button is a bad idea, as it would almost certainly foster bad faith among people who are supposed to be a community of friends. in this case, we would all do well to observe the old adage, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I'm not advocating for a "dislike" button on people's wall posts or comments, but when applied outside of the context of Facebook (or Google+) it makes more sense. Obviously, the potential advantage of Google's +1 or Facebook's "like" over something like Digg is the ability to get a quick impression from people whose opinions you actually respect. As a bonus, businesses could get real (if not necessarily statistically meaningful) feedback on things like the impact of changing their corporate logo.