Online rating: How many stars will you give this piece?

When it comes to books, researchers say it's better to base your decision on the heartfelt language you come across in reviews rather than merely looking for stars. (Photo by Lilartsy via Unsplash)

The third season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror opened with an episode set in a world not unlike our own, but one in which people rate each other from one to five stars for every personal exchange. It could be at work, at home, or anywhere else. This warped indicator of social status has an impact on a citizen’s housing, relationships, and ability to work and travel. Spoiler: it doesn’t end well for the main character.

We haven’t reached that far yet, but there’s a disproportionate emphasis given to online product ratings that affects the way they’re received. In a recent piece for the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Noelia Ramirez asks the question: is the cult of scoring every cultural product we consume getting out of hand?

Her focus is on author Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent decision to withdraw her forthcoming novel set in 19th century Russia because of criticism from Ukrainian readers. When Gilbert had earlier announced its publication, it was met with a spate of single-star reviews on the Goodreads site – by those who hadn’t read it yet.

At that time, Roxane Gay had tweeted: “Goodreads really needs a mechanism for stopping one-star attacks on writers. It undermines what little credibility they have left.” Author Kristi Coulter, who worked at Amazon for a decade, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that unlike Amazon’s marketplace, Goodreads is designed “so you don’t have to buy a product to review a book. That makes it ripe for abuse.”

Review-bombing apart, there are other issues with such book rankings. The El Pais piece goes on to quote Spanish philosopher Marina Garcés, who feels that the practice leads to a culture where we’re merely checking off lists of things we have seen, experienced, read or consumed. That approach works best for taxis and groceries.

Bookmarks, LitHib’s book review site, seems to have realized this early on. The site started with assigning stars to books based on mainstream reviews, but quickly shifted to a scale that moves from Pan to Rave, based on an assessment of the reviews in question.

On other sites such as Amazon, which bought Goodreads in 2013, the star classification system stays in place for all products, including books. Here, review-bombing can be taken to despicable extremes, often by those who don’t agree with a book’s contents only based on social media posts or blurbs.

Several one-star ratings for books on Amazon are hilarious. Of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, one disgruntled reader feels that it is merely “a combination of Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey.” Another reader criticizes Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude because there’s “not a single true thing in this book”. As for Harper Lee’s beloved classic, a disgruntled reviewer says that “it gives little, if any, guidance on the killing of mockingbirds”. (That has to be tongue in cheek, surely. Or is it? One never knows nowadays.)

Of course, people should be free to voice their opinions, whether on the classics or anything else. For many, though, clicking on a star is a way of avoiding engagement and not thinking deeply enough about the reasons for liking or disliking a book.

Online platforms promote this because it is a frictionless way of increasing engagement. It finds pride of place in the gamification toolbox so beloved of digital marketers, with consultants coaching executives on ways to get more users to rate their products.

Writing in the Guardian, Katie Cunningham highlighted an issue with this approach. She refers to a recent study which shows that more than 80 percent of online reviews rate items with four or five stars, creating what’s called “a positivity problem”.  How is one to choose between them?

It’s better, the researchers say, to base your decision on the heartfelt language you come across in reviews, rather than merely looking for stars. (If there’s a book you love, such reviews are an effective way to let others know.) As for whether a majority of the comments are genuine in the first place, that’s another story.

For New Yorker writer Kyle Chyka, the dominance of the digital world can put many creators under pressure “because they can see what everyone is saying online and rate the success of their art in terms of likes”. A little like nervous gladiators looking up at a packed arena for thumbs up signs.

“Quantification makes the strangest, weirdest, most radical things harder for consumers to find and harder for artists to make,” Chyka points out. Little wonder that there are so many works nowadays safely nestling within the prison bars of rigid conventions and low expectations. It’s the price one pays for being ruled by algorithms.