How I rate things now and why I think you should too
Ratings on this site are out of five stars. I adapted the scale from Goodreads, where each star rating has a short meaning instead of being a score.
| Stars | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ★★★★★ | Perfect, or life-changing |
| ★★★★☆ | I love it |
| ★★★☆☆ | I like it |
| ★★☆☆☆ | It’s ok |
| ★☆☆☆☆ | I don’t like it, or I hate it |
Why I changed it
I switched to this scale a few months ago because of what felt like rating inflation. I was handing out too many five stars, and there was no way to tell a five apart from a four. So I spent some time and re-rated everything on my Goodreads shelf. That rating system has now carried over into other parts of my life. When I moved my restaurant notes from a doc to this site, I recalibrated those ratings to the same scale.
Bias towards the enjoyable (jolly little fucker, ain’t he?)
I’ve come to realize that for a lot of things in my life, I have a bias towards enjoying things. I see a movie: was I entertained, and was the popcorn not too soggy? Great, I had a good time. I read a book: did it not actively make me want to stop? Good, I enjoyed it.
It seems silly to me to be the opposite where you’re nitpicking everything to the point where you’re no longer enjoying anything.
Given all that, most of the things I review are on the enjoyable side, not the disagreeable side. Because of that, I want to have more nuance there. There’s a large difference between a book I really enjoyed (many enjoyable page turners) and a book that changed me and my thought process (for example, The Three-Body Problem trilogy).
On the other side, there’s really no point in distinguishing between a book that I disliked (War and Peace, might give it another try though) and a book I actively hated (Think and Grow Rich). Either way, I don’t recommend it.
Four versus five
When I’m deciding between four and five stars, I ask one question: is there anything they could possibly do to make it better? If I can think of something, it’s a four. Five stars is for when I can’t, so I give out very few.
Off this site
I rate this way here, but I still have a hard time doing it on public review sites. A three-star review on Google or Yelp reads as a complaint, and I feel bad. So the stars here are more honest than the ones I leave there.
Why you should too
Five stars gives you five levels to convey meaning (if you ignore the half stars — I’m indecisive sometimes). I care much more about what you enjoy than what you dislike, so compressing the data for the dislikes gives me more nuance about your likes. If everything is five stars, nothing is. Spreading the good side across three levels keeps “I liked it,” “I loved it” and “this changed me” separate, so when you do give out five stars, it carries more weight.
It also makes me feel less hypercritical. Giving a book four stars stops feeling like a criticism, and it makes the rare five feel special.