[ImAnAmateur]

This mirrors my experience in retail. Anything less than the top score is counted as a negative, often counting the 1-9 score as a 0 with the 10 as a 1. The heat lands on a local manager when corporate comes to town. What ends up happening is that the customer-facing employees train the customers to put down 10s.

It's ultimately a metric that's been gamified by everyone involved. I think the cynics keep it around because it gives customers a voice.

[LocalH]

Which is ironic, given that it modifies the customer's actual voice when interpreting the numbers in such a toxic way. I point to the cousin comment where a salesman lost a $10k bonus because a customer didn't give them a 10, despite the customer's comment being very explicit that they were extremely happy with the experience, but that they refused to rate anything perfectly, as they reserved that for God. Despite that comment, the 9 was used as justification to deny the bonus, effectively also denying the customer's voice.

[salad-tycoon]

Or pull a YouTube/google and just eventually totally remove the option to down vote at all. “ Yeah… we’ve heard the vox populi and ehhh, gonna have to pass on that one.”