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So if you follow the AirBnB host forums at all, anything less than a five star(absolute best possible) review is considered bad. Hosts flip out all the time on

• lordleft 7y ago
  There is a real sense of rating inflation happening here. It makes a 4-starred place seem especially sub-standard, even though it might be the result of a single unreasonable guest, or even a reasonable guest providing a muted review. Yelp is hated in the restaurant industry for similar reasons.
• viceroyalbean 7y ago
  This seems to be a problem with most similar review systems. I believe Uber has similar issues with anything less than 5 stars being considered unacceptable and causing problems for drivers.
• devit 7y ago
  Do users really evaluate like that? For me, it's pretty obvious that rating is arbitrary and depends on how optimistic/perfectionist/obsessive/etc. the reviewer is and that there is not much difference between 4 or 5 stars.
  • burkaman 7y ago
    It's not users, it's the platform itself. AirBnB and other companies like Uber and Lyft will significantly deprioritize you if your average rating isn't very close to 5 stars. Rating your Uber driver 3 stars can significantly affect how many fares they're offered and therefore how much money they can make.
    • devit 7y ago
      But if users don't care, why do platforms care? Maybe it's actually a reliable signal? Obviously it's also more reliable in the context of other evaluations by the same reviewer which the platform has easy access to, i.e. if someone always gives 5 stars, then a 4 star review from him is much worse than one from someone who never gives 5 stars.
      • chris11 7y ago
        Users caring might mean that a user is 15% more likely to select a 5 star host over a 4.5 star host, not that the user will say a 5 star rating is a top concern.
• asdfman123 7y ago
  I feel a better system is just thumbs up/thumbs down. Either it was satisfactory, or it wasn't. Basically the same as our current 5 star/1 star dichotomy but it makes things more clear to people who are tempted to give 4 stars.
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    Even though it seems like shrinking the available options will lead to less fine-grained data, sometimes it seems like it actually works out better. I really liked how Four Square only had thumbs up and thumbs down as the allowed ratings. I feel like it did a very good job of capturing how aligned with expectations the restaurant experience was. It also made it really painless to give feedback.
    • 3JPLW 7y ago
      Yup, I really miss UrbanSpoon for the same reason (now owned by zomato and totally ruined). I found it's percent-thumbs-up metric to be so much more valuable than Yelp's 5-star average. If you really want a finer-grained system, have multiple thumbs-up, thumbs-downs.
    • swilliamsio 7y ago
      YouTube originally had a five star rating system for each video but switched to the current thumbs up/down system. I believe the reason given was that almost all viewers either give five stars or one star, which made the middle three ratings pointless.
  • ziziyO 7y ago
    How do we make a single thumbs down not trigger a 5 alarm fire in the customer service department? Anyone else dread the onslaught of follow up from a company after you give a bad rating?
  • icebraining 7y ago
    Is there a dichotomy? I don't see the 1 star being more common than 2 or 3.
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• jfengel 7y ago
  They could circumvent that problem by replacing the five stars with an up/down system -- since that's the way it's interpreted anyway. I don't think most users are capable of giving more nuanced reviews anyway. If they can, it would be better expressed in words than as numbers. If I have a stay that's genuinely superior, I'll write an enthusiastic review. Other than that, "it was fine" or "don't come here" is really all I need to say.
• imiller 7y ago
  I wonder how changing the rating system in cases like these from a five star scale to a thumbs up/down system would affect user behavior and system usefulness. It seems like ebay, uber, airbnb, etc all suffer from the same "anything less than 5 stars is effectively negative" issue.
  • moojd 7y ago
    Once you have a large enough userbase the thumbs up / thumbs down method might be the best option. My favorite example of numbered rating systems failing is metacritic where almost every user score is either a 10 or a 0. They have a weird dynamic where users will give a 10 to counteract a low score or a 0 to counteract an inflated score. Giving a 0 or a 10 makes your vote more impactful so why would you score any different? At the end of the day most people just want to know if people think a service, movie, driver, seller, etc. is worth it or not * . If you need more info you are going to read the reviews anyway. * An exception might be niche user review communities like myanimelist or rateyourmusic
    • colinmhayes 7y ago
      Who looks at the user reviews on metacritic?
      • freddie_mercury 7y ago
        Lots of people? The difference between the critic rating and the user rating is useful information to have when making a viewing decision. If they are both low, that tells you something. If one is low and one is high, that tells you something.
    • KozmoNau7 7y ago
      Grading scales can work, for instance if people are rating and reviewing products in online shops. You're looking at a jacket and you see that while some people rate it 5/5, most of the ratings are 4/5 and 3/5, and 85% of the reviewers say they would recommend the jacket to a friend. So you read the reviews, and gather that most of the medium scores are because the arms are a little shorter than expected and the cut across the back is rather wide. You also notice that everyone is praising the quality of the fabric and worksmanship. Good information, since if you have short arms and the back muscles of a powerlifter, that jacket would probably be a good purchase. That is good use of a scoring system, but it requires people to care about it and about writing reviews. It works for niche sites, but completely breaks down somewhere like Amazon, or on Uber/Airbnb where you get punished for anything less than a perfect score.
• Causality1 7y ago
  It's the same thing with Uber and Lyft. Dropping below 5 stars can result in termination.
• cactus2093 7y ago
  And then when guests know this about the rating system, a lot of them will go even further to avoid giving a low rating because they don't want to harm the hosts' livelihoods unless something truly outrageously bad happened. Just like a lot of people I know will tip 20% on a restaurant bill without even reflecting on the level of the service, because it's so ingrained into people that wait staff rely almost entirely on tips for their livelihoods so people feel guilty using this quality signal mechanism the way it was initially intended.
  • kingkawn 7y ago
    Because the way it was intended is inhumane if you even barely reflect on it
    • icebraining 7y ago
      It's inhumane to give someone a bonus for good performance?
      • kingkawn 7y ago
        It is not a bonus, they are legally exempt from minimum wage laws. The entirety of their livelihood is dependent on our judgements of their service.
        • ItsDeathball 7y ago
          If they don't make enough in tips to reach minimum wage, the employer still needs to close that gap. It's not as exploitative as we're led to believe, or at least no more so than working a minimum wage job is normally.
          • Spivak 7y ago
            Yes but this never happens. If you cost your employer money at the end of the month because you didn't make minimum wage then you'll be fired. Employers don't want to pay out, employees don't want to be fired so nobody ever speaks of it when it happens and employees just accept less than minimum wage.
• notahacker 7y ago
  > If AirBnB was more up front about expectations it would make their review system a lot better. I guess from a strategic point of view it might look better for the AirBnB's and Ubers of this world to have lots of '4.7 out of 5' ratings than 'xx% of people wanted the service provider to be punished', especially to first-time users. But yeah, if Uber in particular wanted to honestly represent what the ratings actually represented it'd be a simple upvote/downvote. Ironically, on platforms more focused on allowing consumers to choose based on qualitative reviews than penalising based on quantitative scores, I tend to find 4* reviews are much more likely to be well-informed enough to influence me into buying the product than the 5* ones, as well as more likely to be a genuine reflection of the purchaser's sentiment.
• lozaning 7y ago
  How would retaliation work? I don't think I've ever been able to see my hosts review of me before submitting mine for them.
• jdminhbg 7y ago
  > The problem here is that guests are never told that 5 stars = normal stay. This leads to problems. If AirBnB was more up front about expectations it would make their review system a lot better. They’re not entirely explicit about it, but to leave anything less than 5 stars AirBnB you have to leave a text explanation of why you did. So it becomes clear quickly that 5 is the norm and less is for an actual problem.
  • chrisseaton 7y ago
    If you score around three stars each time then you’ll see the prompt each time and not think anything of it.
  • nostromo 7y ago
    Yes, this is such an anti-pattern. Once Uber started asking me a thousand questions about why I was leaving someone 4-stars, I stopped leaving reviews entirely.
    • flanbiscuit 7y ago
      Lyft does the same. And when you tap on 3-stars it even says "Just OK" yet it treats it like it was a horrible ride.
      • shalmanese 7y ago
        If a Californian told me a restaurant they went to was "Just OK", I would avoid going to that restaurant unless there were no other alternatives. I think that might be part of the disconnect.
        • beefield 7y ago
          That is something that I find weird in US "ratings". To me, "ok" means that it was... Ok. Definitely nothing bad, from completely satisfactory to good, but not exceptional. Which for some reason seems to translate in US to something like "Awesome, best food ever in my life". Now, my question is, what do you say when you actually get awesome food that is best you have ever eaten?
• wnevets 7y ago
  sounds uber and airbnb should ditch the 5 star system and switch to thumbs up/down like netflix.
  • dreamcompiler 7y ago
    With Netflix the 5 star system made sense and they shouldn't have ditched it. There was no issue of someone losing their livelihood if you left a 4-star review on Netflix, so Netflix movie ratings were pretty accurate I think.
• chrisseaton 7y ago
  I used to give most Uber drivers three stars until someone told me it’s not supposed to be like that. There’s nothing in the app to guide you that the scores are shifted like this.
• bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  Great so now I feel bad for all those less than 5 star reviews I left.
• theklub 7y ago
  Sounds like eBay, buyers can't get anything other than a positive review. You can write whatever you'd like in that review but no one reads them.
• empath75 7y ago
  The fundamental problem is that as soon as a metric is used for financial incentives, it becomes useless as a metric.
• sailfast 7y ago
  Not only do they flip out (which means you leave a 5 star review to avoid drama) but if you have a really crappy host that cancels your reservation or run into any weird issues you are not ALLOWED to leave a review. Therefore the only reviews you are seeing are "successful" stays. I'm never going back to AirBnB. It's been hot garbage all the way down. Can't trust a thing on there.
  • hawaiianbrah 7y ago
    An automated review is posted when the host cancels, indicating how far out the cancelation from the stay happened.
    • yardstick 7y ago
      Do these reviews include stars? Ie would be good to know how the cancellation was handled. There was a recent example in NZ where a host cancelled on a family based on their ethnicity (Covid-19 fear related), would the automatic reviews provide insight into such issues with hosts?
      • hawaiianbrah 7y ago
        The current system can be improved, certainly.
    • sailfast 7y ago
      I've mostly ran into issues where the host is not able to work out a significant issue (unresponsive for days, does not provide access to property, property smells so badly of smoke you cannot breathe adequately - as a former smoker this is a high threshold). This is not technically a cancellation but an "ended stay" and you are not able to leave a review once you have entered the property in my experience. That said, I'm sure it's improved (hopefully in the year+ I haven't touched it) In general, it's been extremely difficult to read between the lines on reviews since they're all five stars, and sometimes you end up reading things unintentionally.
• babypuncher 7y ago
  It sounds like they should switch to a binary review system (thumbs up/down). Leave the nuance to the actual review text.
• windthrown 7y ago
  > If AirBnB was more up front about expectations it would make their review system a lot better. Better for consumers but not better for AirBnB. The fact that potential customers assume that 5-stars indicates an exceptional rather than standard review is an advantage for AirBnB. Revealing the actual rating expectations would cheapen the perception of all the existing reviews.
• jdm2212 7y ago
  TFA's thesis is that people convey negative information -- just not primarily through the star rating. As a longtime Airbnb user I can't imagine staying at a place just because it has a good star rating. You have to read the reviews and see what people liked and didn't like. If a place has a bad star rating I generally wouldn't consider staying there at all, but a 4.8 star rating with lots of substantive reviews and no real complaints is very different from a 4.8 star rating with a bunch of people noting that there's deafening construction noise from 8AM to 8PM. Also, how would anyone retaliate on Airbnb? You can't see the host's review until after you've posted your own.
• KitDuncan 7y ago
  Wouldn't a binary rating system work a lot better here? Either positive or negative + a comment, sounds like it would work way better.
  • krn 7y ago
    > Either positive or negative + a comment, sounds like it would work way better. Exactly. This is how CouchSurfing works. It's just another way of asking "Would you recommend this place / this person to your friend?". And that's what people really want to know, after all.