Each “linear” rating you give may significantly affect someone else’s business, but is in fact more revealing about yourself and your expectations—and is based

Each “linear” rating you give may significantly affect someone else’s business, but is in fact more revealing about yourself and your expectations—and is based on a scale that can be really different from mine or other customers’. I gave up on a linear system of rating long time ago. While seemingly technically correct, it never made total sense in real world—and makes less and less of it as customer bases become more diverse. There are countless individual preferences, weighed arbitrarily by each person. For example, with accommodation, some want casual friendly attitude, others want staff to stay strictly formal, etc. What is minute to me can be a huge deal to you. Rating systems can’t capture reviewer’s background in such a fine detail and control for it in rating calculations. Meanwhile, business owner’s ability to manage prospective guests’ expectations in advance is usually very limited (first, to manage them you must anticipate them, which requires non-trivial experience; second, it’s generally impossible to deny service to someone you suspect might not like your approach without getting a negative review anyway). This applies to dining and other service and to a degree product businesses. My rating system now is 99% binary. (A) If I am on balance positive and want to support continued existence of a business, I give the service or the product a 5-star review (where I explain why I’m favorable and can note drawbacks that could be subjective or fall outside of business operator’s control). (B) If not, I post no feedback, but I may convey it in person. (C) Only if I’m unhappy about aspects that are definitely under business operator’s control, communication with the operator fails, and I want to warn other customers about important but non-obvious factors they should really know about, am I going to post a negative review. Except for fraud, I try to wait for a while first, because upon reflection those factors can still seem subjective. Conversing with small business operators contributed to my decision. On the other hand, when reading reviews, I am comparing the number of reviews to competitors (adjusted for business lifetime, too many or too few is a red flag), see what specifically is complained about in reviews (I want to see complaints about things that don’t matter to me much, perhaps from people with heightened expectations; no complaints at all is a red flag, but so are complaints about real basics if they seem genuine and not made out of spite), and monitor for any signs of artificial positive feedback or listing swaps (immediate red flags).