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She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

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Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#51

Post by fwmcbumcrumble »

candiddevmike wrote: post #29
fsckboy wrote: post #9

Ratings should always be on a curve for the rater, and on a 10 point scale, with no official meaning attached to the number of stars. If you rate everything 10 stars, you just gave everything 5 stars. If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. (you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." N…

Counterpoint: steam reviews with their binary choice result in a better aggregate experience and remove the need for bell curves. Binary choice leaves less room for interpretation and fuzzy ness, you either like something or you don't.

Positive negative and meh is my preferred. Some things aren’t great, but were cheap enough to justify it.

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.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#52

Post by fsckboy »

jmye wrote: post #21
fsckboy wrote: post #9

Ratings should always be on a curve for the rater, and on a 10 point scale, with no official meaning attached to the number of stars. If you rate everything 10 stars, you just gave everything 5 stars. If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. (you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." N…

My issue is that we’ve been trained to see things on a broken scale - 10 is good, 9 is good, 8 is probably ok, 7 is questionable and everything else is really bad. 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.

there needs to be a way to indicate something exceptionally good, and everything can't be that.

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.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#53

Post by yowzadave »

fsckboy wrote: post #9

Ratings should always be on a curve for the rater, and on a 10 point scale, with no official meaning attached to the number of stars. If you rate everything 10 stars, you just gave everything 5 stars. If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. (you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." N…

Maybe this could help with rating inflation by legitimate reviewers, but I don’t think it would help (and could possibly hurt) with the problem of fraudulent reviews. It would just mean that fake reviews would counterbalance their fake positive reviews with fake negative reviews of other products, making all reviews, in both directions, totally unreliable.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#55

Post by subroutine »

candiddevmike wrote: post #29
fsckboy wrote: post #9

Ratings should always be on a curve for the rater, and on a 10 point scale, with no official meaning attached to the number of stars. If you rate everything 10 stars, you just gave everything 5 stars. If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. (you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." N…

Counterpoint: steam reviews with their binary choice result in a better aggregate experience and remove the need for bell curves. Binary choice leaves less room for interpretation and fuzzy ness, you either like something or you don't.

I've heard the arguments for switching to binary choice (netflix also did a big writeup about it), but I'd still prefer the ability to give a bit more nuance in my rating. It feels weird giving a movie that is okay and a movie that is excellent the same rating.

Rotten 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.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#56

Post by subroutine »

fwmcbumcrumble wrote: post #51
candiddevmike wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: steam reviews with their binary choice result in a better aggregate experience and remove the need for bell curves. Binary choice leaves less room for interpretation and fuzzy ness, you either like something or you don't.

Positive negative and meh is my preferred. Some things aren’t great, but were cheap enough to justify it. 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.

How about...

    - thumb down
    - thumb up
    - two thumbs up

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#57

Post by gnicholas »

kstrauser wrote: post #40
lakpan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean… they’re not 100% wrong.

Nah, they're 100% wrong. Maybe a coffee maker isn't as fundamental as, say, a stove or refrigerator, but I'd be unhappily surprised if the place I booked didn't have one. To my recollection, I've never been somewhere without coffee. It wouldn't occur to me to filter for such a thing. Should I also be looking for places that have pillows? I do see what you're saying, but that's an expected basic amenity.

I feel like it depends somewhat on where the unit is located. If it's in a downtown area with half a dozen coffee shops within a few blocks, maybe it's not necessary. But if it's in the suburbs, then yeah coffee is pretty much required.

I wonder what percent of people make use of provided coffee. Some people are pretty strict about what kind of coffee they like, and wouldn't want to use whatever is provided. And some people don't drink coffee, of course.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#58

Post by kstrauser »

gnicholas wrote: post #57
kstrauser wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, they're 100% wrong. Maybe a coffee maker isn't as fundamental as, say, a stove or refrigerator, but I'd be unhappily surprised if the place I booked didn't have one. To my recollection, I've never been somewhere without coffee. It wouldn't occur to me to filter for such a thing. Should I also be looking for places that have pillows? I do see what you're saying, but that's an expected basic amenity.

I feel like it depends somewhat on where the unit is located. If it's in a downtown area with half a dozen coffee shops within a few blocks, maybe it's not necessary. But if it's in the suburbs, then yeah coffee is pretty much required. I wonder what percent of people make use of provided coffee. Some people are pretty strict about what kind of coffee they like, and wouldn't want to use whatever is provided. And some…

“Lovely room, but I have to get up and dressed before I can get caffeine, which makes me subconsciously associate it with a headache and stuffy sinuses.”

A study I just looked up said 74% of American adults drink coffee every day. Of those, approximately 9 of 10 would prefer not to have to leave the house for their morning eye-opener, and 1 in 10 prefer papercuts then lime juice in their eye.

Seriously, no innkeeper who isn’t personally opposed to coffee for some reason would risk pissing off 75% of their customers, especially when it’s so cheap and easy to supply. I would genuinely rather a place lack pillows than on-site coffee.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#59

Post by Eisenstein »

fsckboy wrote: post #50
mplewis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like this doesn’t naturally fall on a bell curve. Most hotels are great. Most restaurants are pretty good. There is no such thing as an objective 5.

in a normal distribution, you expect the mode to be at the mean to be at the median. If that's where most hotels are, and most restaurants, welcome to what 5 objectively means.

You expect that people will rate most things to be 5s based on averages, since if you aggregate your best experiences as 10s and your worst as 0s, then most everything is a 5, right?

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.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#60

Post by _nalply »

justworkout wrote: post #3

I'm currently planning a trip to India. I've been to several countries around the world and never worried about reviews too much, but India really seems to align with this story. I'll see hotels with countless 5 star reviews (hundreds or even thousands!) that are overwhelmingly positive and get ready to book. But with one hotel my BS meter got triggered, since it was in a rather dingy seeming part of town but still h…

Twenty years ago I booked room with sea view at an Indian travel agency.

We were dropped at a house fifteen minutes walking from beach.

The next day I rented a motorbike and we relocated.

We never saw a refund.

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