Oddbean

1-4 is bad bad bad. 4-5 is good. It's actually a binary system because almost everyone who doesn't hate it, gives it a 4 or 5. Items with lots of ratings usually have 4+ because of the way things average out, whereas newcomers and small businesses tend to have terrible ratings because one bad rating can skew the whole scale. You can terrorize or bankrupt small companies or creators with a few bad :star ratings. So, if they get some bad ratings, they will often ask friends, employees, etc. to login and give it some more good ones. 😅

Another thing to consider is that people can rate the raters. The information is bidirectional. (Like, on AirBnB, people who have left others bad ratings are more likely to be turned down by the next place. Or an author that leaves bad reviews on other people's books opens himself up to having them leave bad reviews on his books. Someone who rates products as sub-4 might find that other companies send him out-of-stock notices, instead of sale confirmations.) And this bidirectionality would be even more leveraged, on Nostr, as it would hurt your overall WoT score and follow you around. That means there's a natural disincentive to give bad ratings, as they can boomerang, so you either need to be such a top expert, that you can afford to be critical (and hardly anyone is) or you only give good ratings or no ratings.

I'm pretty immune to issues like that since I have very little concern for "my reputation" at large, only that my friends know that I am trustworthy. Outside of that, IDGAF. If something is bad, it's bad. I can separate a badly written book from one that I disagree with. I have very little issue going against those types of incentives. I know that I'm rare in that way, but... It annoys me that those are even consideration that people worry about. Keep things simple, iteratively improve. Deliver a working product then improve.