Online Ratings Are Broken | Companies aren’t asking for your feedback. They’re begging you for data.::Companies aren’t asking for your feedback. They’re begging you for data.
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Online Ratings Are Broken
Companies aren’t asking for your feedback. They’re begging you for data. By Ian Bogost
A man holding a bag and a clipboard showing a smiling face, a neutral face, a frowning face Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty. August 26, 2023, 7 AM ET Saved Stories
Not to boast, but my feedback is important. So important that, in the past couple of weeks alone, I’ve received a mountain of desperate requests for it.
Amazon, for example, wanted to know if I’d recommend its company based on my Amazon Returns experience. (When the pillow insert I was returning first arrived, the company also asked me to rate my delivery experience.) EGO Power+, the makers of my broken string trimmer, wanted to know if the callback I requested from them yesterday, and missed at 7 a.m. today, had solved my problem—would I complete a survey? When I opened DoorDash to order an acai bowl, the app prodded me to rate Carlos, the dasher who had, days earlier, delivered my Vietnamese noodles, on a five-star scale. An Etsy seller in India from whom I’d purchased a rug sent a fourth message on the app begging me to please rate and review: “It will help my business.” Later, DoorDash also hoped I’d rate the acai joint (separately from the dasher, whom I was also asked to rate). A difficult question; I’d thought the bowl came with fresh fruits, but it turned out I’d have needed to select them manually. Is that the acai bowlery’s fault, or the app operator’s? And why am I being asked to unwind the matter?
Friends, family, and colleagues report similar distress. After a doctor’s visit, one of them got bombarded with demands to review and rate the practice. He finally gave in and left a negative review—partly because it seemed like the office spent more time haranguing him for feedback than providing useful medical advice. Another reported a local market’s incessant demands that she review a nonalcoholic aperitif she once sampled and had utterly forgotten about.
This phenomenon has become so common as to swell into malaise. Data panhandling, let’s call it: a constant, unwelcome, and invasive demand that you provide feedback about everything, all the time. Each “request” is really just begging, an appeal for a favor without any expectation of benefit or reciprocity.
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The root of the problem is that a request for your feedback isn’t actually a request for your feedback; it’s a means to accrue data of a certain kind, for a presumed purpose. For example, the demand to know “if you’d recommend us to a friend or colleague” indicates the pursuit of a market-research benchmark called “net promoter score,” a dumb business metric that persists because it’s easy to use, not because it has value. A doctor or dentist that asks for a rating is probably doing so to raise their local search-engine ranking, so that new patients can find their practice. Five-star reviews for retail or food-service delivery are more often used to lord power over poorly paid flex workers than to improve the service you encounter. If you feel alienated from requests for feedback, that’s because you are.
This dynamic is rarely better even when the underlying reason for the feedback request is clear. When the Etsy seller asked me for a review, he made an implicit truth explicit: Buyers look at ratings for trust, but platforms such as Etsy also use them to rank results. Rating the rug I bought is less about my expression of satisfaction than about helping a small business half a world away. That feels good until it feels bad again. How can a consumer be responsible for the livelihood of every individual who facilitates each transaction they perform?
On the one hand, rating them well costs you nothing. On the other hand, being asked to rate them implicates you in an economic circumstance for which you are not responsible. It’s easy to say, “Just don’t order online from companies that don’t treat their workers well.” But the alternatives are dwindling. When you buy a bauble or a burger, you now also receive an ambiguous position of power over the labor of others. That’s bad enough! But then the company that put you in that situation also begs you to help them further the ill treatment.
Then the demands for input multiply. Data-panhandler companies might implore you to review the delivery, the product delivered, the vendor that made it, the retailer or platform that sold it—and then maybe the support or return experience as well. What you might perceive to be a simple transaction with a singular company burgeons into a whole ecosystem of departments, divisions, partners, and providers, each with their own business objectives, bureaucracies, key performance indicators, and associated surveys, rankings, and metrics. But imposing the structure of a business on the consumer spreads corporate bureaucracy like a disease. Take my busted string trimmer as an example. I just want my lawn tool replaced under warranty. I don’t really care how that happens, and I certainly don’t want to stop to assess each email, phone call, customer-service rep, local repair partner, and freight-logistics service I might encounter along the way. Being asked to rate a phone call I didn’t even receive makes me feel insane.
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And then it happens all the time, for everything you buy, forever. A $500 air fryer or a $5 power strip, a months-in-the-making medical procedure or a yen for crab rangoon—each demands rating on a five-point scale. The cognitive burden of such a life is overwhelming. No human can reasonably be asked to determine whether a pack of #10 × 1/2 wood screws offered a four-star or a five-star fastening experience. Acts of data panhandling impose on your time, but they also impinge on your autonomy. They demand justifications for who you are: Did the set of monstera-leaf bedsheets you bought make you happy? Are you a monstera-leaf-sheets kind of person after all? Every transaction is now also a therapy session gone awry.
Nobody likes to consider themselves a consumer. Not as an identity. I am not a buyer; I am a free man. But before the age of data panhandling, to wear the hat of a consumer at least afforded the freedom of anonymity. In some contexts, the richness of your life might fill a room; you were a registered nurse with a difficult teen, or a social worker with a macramé hobby, or a philandering stockbroker nevertheless committed to local youth baseball. But at the checkout, you were but a vessel voting with your wallet. You could shift in and out of that role, connecting it with your deeper motivations at times, ignoring them at others: Today you are buying a lawnmower because you were a man who tends to his lawn. But today you are also hungry because you are mortal, and a Cobb salad sounds both fresh and substantial. Your purchasing choices could be anonymous to the seller but also to yourself—who knows why you bought a Cobb salad today. You just did. The data panhandlers have stolen that from you.
It is no longer possible just to consume, for every consumer act comes with secret demands invoked only later. Even gratifying transactions—even forgettable ones—are now tainted, because to achieve them, you must evade the corporate hands reaching and mouths calling for you, unending, demanding your assessment, your opinion, your feedback, your review. Consumer life has ended, replaced, against all odds, by something worse.
Small business? I always rate honestly and in detail.
Bad experience? Level headed and honest review that repeats the companies name a lot and the words, ‘review’ and ‘negative’ to pump it up the search ranks.
Everything else? You want my opinion? Pay me.
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You make a good point. We may complain about being asked for feedback, but we all make decisions based on others feedback primarily.
This is a pretty dumb hot take if you ask me. Yes, they are asking for your feedback, which is data. Everything is data. Why is “data” a bad word around here?
The implication of “leave a review!” is they want info on quality to improve service; the twist is they don’t care about that, just getting information about you for ad targeting.
Reviews are good for convincing other customers that you are a real site and the product is what it says it is.
An ethical company leaves up critical reviews and tries to address the issues their customer faced.
The opposite is a company that only allows good reviews to be published or outright fakes them.
I have worked for both kinds of businesses and I can assure you the ethical businesses care very much about bad customer experiences and use the feedback to improve.
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We went from “how can I make this person buy my laundry detergent” to “how can we make this person vote for a fascist wannabe dictator”
Feedback is one thing, one online shop has the guts to ask me to do support for them. If customers have questions about a product, they “crowdsource” and send the question to the people who bought the product.
I would tell you but then I’d have to [data expunged].
Paywalls are broken. Can’t read the article
My policy for giving ratings is that I don’t typically rate products, but if I’m asked to rate service, I always rate 5 stars regardless of the quality of service performed. If it asks me to justify why I rated that way, I just write “Yes.” and pad it with as many characters as is needed. Usually dots or problematic unicode characters.
It depends a bit. Some businesses actually need decent ratings to get going. Podcasts, AirBnB hosts, Indie developers, etc. Large corporations surely don’t need my rating. So I use discretion.
I’m assuming by “need my rating” you mean “need to be rated positively” (and not “need my honest feedback so they can improve their product”).
If so, I do that too, but I think the article has a point that a 5* review can now be more like a vote of “I wish more people bought this/supported this company” than “this product is really top notch”. This is much more useful to companies than it is to other buyers.
Nowadays, a 5* means “This employee did ok” and a 4 or lower means, “They’re the worst employee in the history of the universe.”
Source: Work in an industry that uses this stupid system.
I had a product arrive from etsy fairly cheaply packaged and partially nonfunctional until I took it apart and reassembled it. 5 stars for the indie seller tho
Funnily enough, when ratings were 1-10 people more accurately gave their feelings about an experience. 1-5 started being used to simplify reviews but it really didn’t. It just made them all useless.
1-10 is the same basic system: 9-10 means you’re adequate, 8 means you are worthless.
I rarely rate. If harassed sufficiently, as in the case of Microsoft Teams poo-ups (lol, that typo stays), I’ll rate as low as possible.
I mostly do it because I’ve worked in jobs where my locations were graded on such ratings, and anything less than a 5 was unacceptable. So entering junk 5/5 ratings is my small protest against that without messing up someone’s job in the process.
Same here. People don’t realize the real world impact reviews have on people that can’t change what needs to be fixed. 5 star reviews with negative wording doesn’t screw up someone’s livelihood while still getting the point across.
For a lot of those ratings, if you rate anything less than the top score, they blame it on the retailer. For example, my dad did one of those for a dealership that did some work to his car and rated the dealership high, but he had one comment about the quality of the vehicle - which is obviously not in the dealership’s control. But the manufacturer came back to the dealer about it (the service guy at the dealer told him). Anything less than perfect is seen as a failure.
It’s offensive to me as a statistician that companies do this.
Exactly the same here. But if they ask NPS first, they won’t get a rating at all.
I hate when I buy something and I get emails hassling me about a review for weeks afterwards. I normally 1-star all pushy reviews, but if they’re just farming for data… I’m going to start using my “other” email when making purchases.
This author is the atypical consumer.
Dude, literally stop buying shit and this ‘problem’ stops.
Be more mindful with your consumption.
