I like to leave reviews for places I stay and eat. But, I hate to keep feeding the Google machine. Yelp seems to be mostly a US thing, and I’m not a power Trip Advisor user (although I have nothing against them).
Where do you read/leave reviews the most?
Yes they are… the reason I think that way is that I like to look at relative rankings; as in, it’s not accurate to just look at how many stars a place got, but rather compare it with other places around it
If I recall… at least in Chicago where good restaurants easily get 500+ ratings. I have never had a “miss” at a place 4.7 stars or above on Google, and the local “cult classic” was at like 4.9; 4.5-4.6 can be hit-or-miss; any fine dining below 4.5 is almost always a miss. Obviously since almost none of those establishments got below 4, just looking at the number of stars isn’t useful… but if I have adjust my expectations accordingly (>=4.6 is solid, <=4.4 is bad) it’s actually quite useful
Sadly I have no clue whether it translates to other places. Fairly certain ppl in my current city are a lot more critical (so maybe a 4.7 in Chicago would be… 4.4 here, or something like that)
How is that not inflated? For my personal ratings, a three is something I’d be happy to eat every day. A five is close to unattainable. It’s basically centered on 2.5 with something like a tapered normal distribution. It’s tedious mapping out so I’m not lowering ratings for good places so I don’t rate anymore.
But getting past me being difficult, you can’t even rate 4.5 can you? Isn’t that information being lost when the way people rate is basically 5 for thumb up and every other number is a thumb down?
You’re right about it being useful to look at relative ratings, I just wouldn’t label that as really accurate.
It’s a separate issue but you brought up categories. I never loved rating in a situation like on Airbnb where one place might be a deliberately expensive penthouse and another might be deliberately a cheap shared room in the wilderness, especially with something like a “cleanliness” rating