We live in a world of ratings. Stars, percentages, grades, medals… every choice, decision, and opinion is (or can be) filtered through a score. Pick a movie, book a hotel, download an app, podcast, or get a ride and you are compelled to give a rating.
Ratings are the fuel to keep the algorithms churning and buried inside all these numbers is a bigger question: what’s the best way to rate anything? Some systems feel intuitive. Others feel forced. A few pretend to offer precision but just end up confusing and meaningless.
If we’re forced to live by ratings, we should be more intentional about which system we use, and ensure the systems we use are human readable and not just fodder to train the machine on “engagement.”
Even beef has an eight point grading system to identify quality: Prime, Choice, Good, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, and Canner.
How to Judge the Judges
What makes a rating system good? A good rating system does real work. It tells you something fast and gives you enough nuance to make an actual decision. It’s easy to read, but also easy to submit.
Talking with some of the most opinionated and critical people I know has uncovered four essential criteria for a rating system:
1. Simplicity
A great system is instantly understandable. You shouldn’t need a tutorial or any understanding of maths.
2. Expressiveness
It needs range. Can you express love, hate, or a few shades in between? A binary system is fast but perhaps too blunt. On the other side, too much granularity gets muddy. What is the Goldilocks range?
3. Cultural Familiarity
Good systems feel natural. We recognize them, we trust them, and we don’t need to second-guess what they mean. A well-known scale speeds up decision-making because we’ve already internalized the stakes.
4. Durability
Ratings are most useful if they hold their value over time. Systems that collapse into inflation (like Uber’s pass/fail masquerading as a 5-point scale, or the creeping rise of academic grades) fail here. Durability means a 3-star rating today still feels like a 3-star tomorrow.
The Landscape of Ratings
There are a nearly infinite number of contenders. Let’s examine some examples, each with strengths, each with flaws, and try to understand what works and doesn’t. Through the lens of simplicity, expressiveness, familiarity, and durability, here’s how some system stack up:
Simple Binary: Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down
The cleanest possible system, perfected by Siskel & Ebert, and instantly understandable. No middle ground, no hedging. You like it, or you don’t.
- Simplicity: Perfect.
- Expressiveness: Weak. No nuance.
- Familiarity: Universal.
- Durability: Stable, but limited.
Binary systems work well for speed but fall apart when you want to say, “It was fine, but not great.” Useful, but blunt-force. Works better with a group where Siskel and Ebert can give different ratings.
Tiered Categories: Medals, Stars, Ribbons
Gold, silver, bronze. One star, two stars, five stars. These systems give you hierarchy without overwhelming detail.
- Simplicity: Strong.
- Expressiveness: Moderate. Enough range for basic nuance.
- Familiarity: Very high. Everyone knows what gold or “5-stars” means.
- Durability: Holds up well over time.
Tiered categories hit a sweet spot. They’re intuitive, familiar, and they scale. Crucially, they avoid the false precision trap, but the middle (3-stars) can become a meaningless dumping ground.
Percentage Systems / Decimals
Nothing feels more scientific than a percentage. But this is often a lie.
- Simplicity: Deceptively simple.
- Expressiveness: Overly precise for no reason.
- Familiarity: High, but misunderstood.
- Durability: Weak. Easy to inflate, hard to trust.
An 87%, or an “8.7” feels precise, but does it really mean anything? Most of the time, these numbers are just window dressing for simpler systems underneath.
The counterpoint to this was the old Pitchfork reviews (the chart is a distribution of their reviews from Analysis of Pitchfork Music Reviews) where it was clear a lot of time and agony was spent on the different between a 6.7 and a 6.8. This worked great for them, but most of us are not willing to spend quite so much time on the decimals.
Academic Grades: A–F
We all know this one. Built into our lives early, but loaded with emotional baggage.
- Simplicity: Familiar, but slightly coded (what’s a “C” really mean?).
- Expressiveness: Moderate to high, depending on the use of +/-.
- Familiarity: Extremely high.
- Durability: Poor. Grade inflation killed this system.
The problem is inflation. In school, a “C” is technically average—but culturally, it feels like failure. Grades have become skewed to the top and suffer from the “Uber problem” where anything that isn’t an A feels like a failure.
Official Certifications: MPAA, LEED, Bond Ratings
Standardized, regulated, and supposedly neutral. In practice, bureaucratic and opaque.
- Simplicity: Low. Requires explanation.
- Expressiveness: Narrow and rigid.
- Familiarity: Moderate, but depends on context.
- Durability: Variable. Some hold up, others feel outdated fast.
These systems try to codify judgment, but the bureaucracy means they often lag behind culture. MPAA ratings tell you less about quality and more about what the censors think. LEED certifies building efficiency, but good design doesn’t always align with green checkboxes. And bond ratings? A complete maze. AAA, BB+, junk status—it is completely inaccessible to anyone outside of finance. Worse, the rating agencies have a history of getting it wrong, sometimes catastrophically. These system feels both overly complex and strangely fragile.
The Original Netflix 5-Star System
Let’s talk about perfection.
The original Netflix 5-star system wasn’t just good—it kicked off a new golden age of ratings. The original system presented five clear choices, each one carrying real meaning:
- 5 stars: Really love it!
- 4 stars: Love it.
- 3 stars: Like it.
- 2 stars: Don’t like it.
- 1 star: Hate it.
What made it work? Simplicity and clarity. You always knew what you were saying. No guessing, no bloated scale full of meaningless decimals. You picked your spot, and your spot meant something.
Even better: Netflix designed the scale with a slight optimism bias. The middle point, 3 stars, wasn’t neutral. It was like it. You still had to choose—at minimum—whether you liked the thing or not. There was no dead-zone, no “meh” vote, no sitting on the fence. Every rating leaned into action. It forced an opinion. And that’s exactly what a rating system should do.
For movies, this was ideal. Films live and die by emotional reaction, and this system captured that perfectly. There was room for nuance without slowing you down in the finer points of a 6.7 vs. 6.8.
Of course, Netflix abandoned the five stars in 2017. In an act of corporate cowardice they buckled under the weight of their own data obsession and swapped it for a binary thumbs-up/thumbs-down system, claiming it was “simpler.” But what they really did was drain the expressiveness out of the experience. They traded UX clarity for bluntness, and nuance for efficiency.
Choose Your Rating System Wisely
In the end, it’s clear: not all rating systems are built to last. Some collapse under their own weight, like the bloated percentage scores that pretend to offer precision but instead deliver noise. Others are sabotaged by their own incentives, like Uber and Airbnb, where anything less than a perfect score quietly counts as failure. The system might look nuanced, but the corporate overlords turn it into pass/fail.
Netflix’s former 5-star system, though, holds the line. Five clear points of differentiation. Enough nuance to express real opinion, slightly skewed to optimism, and without slipping into meaningless decimal dust. It’s fast, it’s easy to understand, and crucially—it resists inflation. The stars hold their meaning.
If we’re going to be serious about rating things, we need to be serious about rating systems. If we want to actually express taste, opinion, and quality, there’s one clear “5-star” option. The former Netflix 5-star is the best rating system ever created and I really love it.
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