Here’s an uncomfortable thing to admit on a site where I put a numerical rating on nearly everything I write about: I don’t actually trust star ratings, mine included, and I think most of us are quietly aware that the number is doing far less work than the paragraph above it, we just don’t say so out loud because the number is easier to skim and the whole internet has organized itself around things being easy to skim.
The problem isn’t that ratings are dishonest exactly, it’s that they compress an experience that has maybe six or seven genuinely distinct dimensions, pacing, prose or component quality, whether it delivered on its own premise, whether I’d actually recommend it to a specific person versus a general audience, into one digit that has to stand in for all of it at once. A book can have a incredible central idea and a genuinely disappointing ending and land at four stars, and a book with a merely decent idea executed with total competence from start to finish can also land at four stars, and those are not the same experience even though the number says they are.
I noticed this most clearly rereading my own reviews back to back one evening, which I don’t recommend doing, it’s a strange kind of self-audit. Two different four-star reviews I’d written months apart described completely different relationships to their subjects, one was “genuinely great with one real flaw,” the other was “solid but I probably won’t think about it again,” and if you only looked at the star count you’d assume I felt roughly the same amount of enthusiasm about both. I didn’t. Not close.
What I’ve landed on, for myself, is treating the star rating as a courtesy to whoever’s skimming rather than the actual verdict, the actual verdict is always in the prose, in whatever specific thing I chose to spend four hundred words explaining rather than just asserting. If you only read my rating and skip the review, you’re getting maybe a third of the actual information, and possibly the least useful third, since the number can’t tell you whether the flaw I found is the kind of flaw that would bother you specifically or the kind that’s purely a matter of my own particular taste.
I’m not going to stop using stars, mostly because I think a page with zero at-a-glance signal is its own kind of unhelpful, and partly because, let’s be honest, people expect the number and I’d rather give it to them than pretend I’m above the convention. But I’d genuinely rather you disagreed with my rating after reading the review than agreed with it after skipping straight to the number, because the second version means I’ve failed to actually tell you anything, and told you a digit instead.