[awiejrliawjer]

One problem is that people just give five stars by default. "I didn't find any insects or hair in my food. Five Stars." Another problem is that there is no consistency. People who only ever eat at McDonalds give all the McDonalds near them four or five stars and people who only eat at Michelin Star restaurants give all of those four or five stars. There's no standard across restaurants. So my solution is, I'm going to actually visit and review every restaurant in my town (there are about 30 of them) and I'm going to use a consistent scale. 5 means wow, this is genuinely the best I've ever had in this genre. 4 means very good, above average. 3 means decent, average, worth your time. 2 means not great, but edible. 1 means don't go here.

[kemayo]

I think that the people who rate McDonald's 5-stars are probably being more helpful about the system than you are, because "restaurants" is far too broad a category to have a consistent scale within.

Instead, it's more useful to rate a given restaurant compared to its sub-genre (or at least its price band) -- was it good for a fast-food restaurant? -- so you might rate a disappointing experience at a Michelin star restaurant lower than you'd rate a clean McDonald's with fast service, just because of how they're meeting your expectations.

This results in usable review aggregates. If I look at a Yelp! listing for a McDonald's and I see it's 2-stars, I want to know that's because it's bad for a McDonald's, not just because the person rating it thinks that a McDonald's inherently has a cap of being "not great, but edible".

[balderdash]

In addition to not rating within a category/genre, I actually find that people tend to overweight meal price in their weighting (e.g. an expensive but average Italian dinner gets a higher rating than a phenomenal and cheap slice of pizza)