>Maybe it's the "star rating" system that's broken.
While less so for product reviews, I feel like restaurant/hotel reviews are more like movie reviews. Just like Battlefield Earth, there are some bad restaurants that universally will get panned. And there are some just wonderful establishments everyone will love, just like Shawshank Redemption.
But for everything in between, it's a matter of taste, which is why Netflix tries to infer your tastes and predict a star rating for _you_ rather than gives you an aggregate rating.
Someone might give a dive bar a one-star review because it's smoky, they only accept cash, and they only sell Bud Light. However that same person might give a 5-star review to a craft beer bar that refuses to sell mass market lagers.
On the flipside, someone might give the dive 5 stars because the drinks are cheap and it's one of the last places in town where they can go out and still light up. And they might give the fancy bar one star for being too pretentious.
Neither opinion is wrong, people just like different things. Glomming this all into an average star rating just seems to give me useless information.
> for everything in between, it's a matter of taste, which is why Netflix tries to infer your tastes and predict a star rating for _you_ rather than gives you an aggregate rating.
This works only to an extent. There are many movie qualities that can be very important to you that you can't represent with a 5 star rating system. Because of this, the main way Netflix clusters your preferences is by the things they know, like genre, actors, producers/directors, etc., and they assume your high rating is (in part) for these things.
This problem is much more prevalent in music suggestions (Pandora, Spotify, etc.) where your preferences are determined almost entirely by genre and artist.
The problem is even more prevalent in ratings for restaurants. If you give 5 stars to an excellent Mexican restaurant, Yelp and Google Maps will suggest to you other Mexican restaurants.
So as a savvy user, you are in a strange position of having to realize how they are clustering things, and give 5 stars to things you don't really like, because you want to be given recommendations for high-rated things in those genres.
And you can't give 1 star to a movie in a genre that you like, otherwise the system will think you hate that genre.
So I would agree with the previous comment, that the "star rating" system is totally broken.
> And there are some just wonderful establishments everyone will love, just like Shawshank Redemption.
Interestingly Shawshank was panned by critics on release, and was a "cult classic" / slow burner that took a while to get to the status of universally loved.
One of the problems of reviews is that so few of them just give me the mechanics.
While less so for product reviews, I feel like restaurant/hotel reviews are more like movie reviews. Just like Battlefield Earth, there are some bad restaurants that universally will get panned. And there are some just wonderful establishments everyone will love, just like Shawshank Redemption.
But for everything in between, it's a matter of taste, which is why Netflix tries to infer your tastes and predict a star rating for _you_ rather than gives you an aggregate rating.
Someone might give a dive bar a one-star review because it's smoky, they only accept cash, and they only sell Bud Light. However that same person might give a 5-star review to a craft beer bar that refuses to sell mass market lagers.
On the flipside, someone might give the dive 5 stars because the drinks are cheap and it's one of the last places in town where they can go out and still light up. And they might give the fancy bar one star for being too pretentious.
Neither opinion is wrong, people just like different things. Glomming this all into an average star rating just seems to give me useless information.