I am concerned about a trend that seems to be occurring with reviews. More and more people are rating everything as five stars. Not everything is the best and not everything should be reviewed as such. A restaurant, park, museum, etc could be really good and maybe even great but still should be rated as four stars. Without that we lose the sense of differentiation between places and lose the ability to mark something as exceptional and truly deserving of five stars.
I think this is happening because we all recognize that as all places we rate get closer and closer to 5.0 average ratings that the number 4 ends up having too much power. We like a place, really like it but end up hurting the establishment because our 4 carries so much weight when their average is 4.5.
This is especially true at sites like AirBnB where the majority of properties have five-star ratings and we all then skip right past any property that has the slightest defect described in the reviews or reflected in the average rating.
Maybe a solution to this problem would be for Google Maps and other entities that allow us to review to only give five stars to a certain number of places per month. Or maybe, what would be better would be if each “Local Guide” had a limited number of “Gold Star Stickers” that we could give out per month. Maybe only one or two of these that we could reward to what we truly see as exceptional places that really stand out from the rest. This new “Gold Star Sticker” count could be displayed with reviews on Google Maps and seeing at least one would tell a user that some local guide really sees this place as exceptional. That would be valuable information.
What do you think?