Editing 1098: Star Ratings

Jump to: navigation, search

Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.

The edit can be undone. Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision Your text
Line 8: Line 8:
  
 
==Explanation==
 
==Explanation==
−
This comic deals with the idea that users when viewing online star ratings are usually heavily biased towards the best possible rating (five stars). As there are nine possible scores in the rating system in the comic (1 star, 1.5 stars, 2 stars...4.5 stars, and finally 5 stars), a rating of 3 out of 5 stars is supposed to represent "average" or "mediocre". Thus, anything above 3-and-a-half stars is supposed to be "good" and anything below 3-and-a-half stars is "bad". However, most people consider a four-star rating to be "OK", and everything below as "crap".  
+
This comic deals with the idea that user-generated online star ratings are usually heavily biased towards the best possible rating (five stars).
  
−
{| class="wikitable"
+
Firstly, because we instinctively read a rating of five stars as five points, but the lowest possible rating is actually one star and not zero as would be the lowest possible score with a five point scale. This means that a three star rating, which looks like a 3/5, seems a good rating, whereas it is actually the median rating, like 10/20 which does not seem a very good score.
−
|-
 
−
! Star Rating!! Randall's Conclusion || Explanation
 
−
|-
 
−
| 5 Stars || [Has Only One Review] || No product is so perfect that every user will give it five stars - as soon as one person gives it less than five, the overall review score will drop. Fake reviews are also factors that often push an aggregate score higher, although this is not addressed in the comic. For this reason, the only explanation for a five-star rating is that only a few users have voted, maybe only one.
 
−
|-
 
−
| 4.5 Stars || Excellent || When a business has many customers it's impossible to please all of them (or they did please them all and some are posting bad reviews as a cruel prank). However, 4.5 stars means almost everyone finds the business pleasant.  
 
−
|-
 
−
| 4 Stars || OK || If it has 4 stars this means that a significant portion of the customers are having a bad experience at the store
 
−
|-
 
−
| 3.5 Stars - 0 Stars || Crap || 3.5 stars and below means a large percentage of people have a bad experience at the shop.
 
−
|}
 
  
 +
Secondly, because the online ratings are given by users who, firstly, browse web pages about the rated products; and there is a general tendency that the users who browse online content about a product are more likely users who in the first place were interested by said product (and for instance have searched for it). So the product ratings are given by a part of the population that on average enjoy the concerned products more than the rest of the population, therefore ratings are on average higher than what the full range (from one to five stars) could express.
  
−
The title text may refer to the folkloric practice of attributing a feeling of a chill to someone walking on your future grave. When Randall is back home he would like to give a bad rating on {{w|Yelp}} — a corporation that operates an "online urban guide" — and hovering his hand over the 'one-star' button, he was just 'walking' over the rating on his own future grave.
+
For these reasons, [[Randall]] suggests a way to read these ratings, which is to consider the four star rating the median value ("OK"), and everything below as a "crap" rating.
  
−
Another possible explanation for the title text is that the headstones are from people who gave the cemetery star ratings and were then murdered, having their given ratings displayed in the headstones. This would explain the chill Randall feels before clicking the one-star button.
+
See also: [[937: TornadoGuard]], another comic about star ratings.
  
−
Finally, the "world's creepiest cemetery, where the headstones just had names and star ratings" could simply be Randall not understanding he was in a Jewish cemetery where headstones have {{w|Star of David}}s on them. Note that these would exclusively be {{w|hexagram}}s, rather than the more usual five-pointed/ten-edged variety of concave {{w|star polygon}} used in actual rating systems.
+
No product is so perfect that every user will give it five stars. So the only explanation for a five star rating is that only a few users have voted, maybe only one.
  
−
See also: [[937: TornadoGuard]], another comic about star ratings.
+
The title text insinuates that people buried in the cemetery would have haunted Randall if he had given the graveyard a low rating, or that those who left a review ended up in the graveyard themselves, with their star rating on their headstone.
  
 
==Transcript==
 
==Transcript==
Line 38: Line 28:
 
:4.5 stars: Excellent
 
:4.5 stars: Excellent
 
:4 stars: OK
 
:4 stars: OK
−
:3.5-1 star: Crap
+
:3.5-1 star: Crap.
  
 
==Trivia==
 
==Trivia==
−
*The image at the end of [http://what-if.xkcd.com/69/ What-If 69] references this comic in the title text.
+
 
 +
*The image at the end of [http://what-if.xkcd.com/69/ What-If 69] references this comic in the image-text.
  
 
{{comic discussion}}
 
{{comic discussion}}
−
 
−
[[Category:Charts]]
 
−
[[Category:Online reviews]]
 

Please note that all contributions to explain xkcd may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see explain xkcd:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:

Cancel | Editing help (opens in new window)

Templates used on this page:

Retrieved from "https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1098:_Star_Ratings"