Pluriblog

In our last post, we talked about how “summary” is a much better way than “search” for people to make sense of opinions on the internet.

There is, of course, one form of summary that already exists and is ubiquitous across the web: The Five Star system. There’s only one problem with it. The Five Star system sucks.

The major problem with the Five Star system is that it can only tell you whether people liked a certain item. It can’t say anything about why they felt that way.

For example, if you see that a movie got 4.5 stars, what does that really mean? Did it get that rating because it has good acting? A good plot? You can’t help but wonder, why didn’t it get 5 stars? Was the cinematography lacking? Or maybe it wasn’t funny enough? The star system can’t help you quickly discern that kind of information. You still don’t know the “why”.

Even in its stated task of helping you see how much people liked an item, the Five Star system is pretty useless. The vast majority of items on the web have a rating between 3.5 and 4.5 stars. Is there really any substantive difference between 4.2 stars and 4.4 stars? Even if one exists, it is hard to discern. The system doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Taken together, it’s easy to see that the Five Star system– as it stands today– has almost no communicative value at all. It’s time to liberate ourselves from this tyranny and call the system what it is: a weak numerical hack.

That is why at Pluribo we’ve been building a technology that can augment the traditional Five Star system with something much more powerful than a mere numerical summary. It will actually be capable of succinctly summarizing both whether and why people liked an item.

We will be launching it (in limited form) very soon. And we hope that once we do, it can help make that old Five Star system look positively paleolithic.