[waspight]

I have always wondered about the ratings. It seems to me that all movies below 6 is trash. Has this always been this way? One would imagine that a 5 star rating would be ok since it is right between 0 (bad) and 10 (great). I guess some kind of inflation in the ratings is going on, but how is such things prevented in these kinds of ratings over time? Is it even possible to prevent?

[ScottEvtuch]

I think the false assumption you are making is that the "average" movie is good. There are a lot of trash movies out there.

[duckmysick]

L'equipe, a French sports newspaper, sticks to the traditional interpretation of the 1-10 scale when rating players' performances. In football (soccer), they rate all players on both teams who played enough minutes, so there's at least 22 ratings per match - 5/10 being average and 10/10 being truly exceptional.

Since the late 80s they have given only a dozen or so perfect 10/10 ratings. Almost half of them was given in the past five years, so I guess inflation creeps up everywhere.

[zaik]

Maybe today's football players are simply performing better than players from the 80s?

[dhosek]

I tend to view 1–10 ratings differently than 1–5. 1–5 is more like (American) letter grades where 3 stars equals a C and is average. On a 1–10 rating, it’s more like percentages so 9–10 is an A, 8–9 a B, 7–8 a C, 6–7 a D and less than 6 an F. I’ve seen elsewhere that at least one aggregator does similar to convert between 1–10 scales and 5-star scales so I think that this is a common unspoken assumption of the relation between the two scales.