[macobo]

Why take 60% of the rating space up by negative ratings? It seems like what you really care about is degrees of goodness.

An alternative approach:

1 - I disliked it. 2 - It's OK 3 - This is good 4 - This is great 5 - This is a must-read

[SamBam]

It's the problem with star systems, which is that we'll always have different definitions. Your 3s are living next to the other poster's 3s and mean very different things.

That said, I think the world has also suffered from ratings inflation. I tend to assume anything under a 4 means "bad" or "meh" myself.

[chillfox]

The best rating system I have ever seen is the "best of two" system that pixoto.com uses to rate photos.

[robryan]

Bigger numbers don't help much either, rating systems out of 10 tend towards anything under an 8 or maybe a 7 being average.

[hipnoizz]

This is exactly the way the current Goodreads rating is supposed to work (and I'm personally OK with it). But my guesstimate is that for 95% Goodreads users everything below 4 stars means that the book sucks.

[SECProto]

How do you know that's how the rating system is "supposed" to work?

[ThePadawan]

(Not parent)

If you go to rate a book on good reads and hover over each of the the 5 stars, here are the "title" attributes of the links:

* title="did not like it"

* title="it was ok"

* title="liked it"

* title="really liked it"

* title="it was amazing"

[SECProto]

Interesting, thanks. I use the app mainly, and it doesn't have those descriptors as far as I know.

I think it's interesting to have the middle/neautral rating described (3 star, middle of the range available) as "liked it" (a positive response).