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Online Ratings Are Broken

Companies aren’t asking for your feedback. They’re begging you for data. By Ian Bogost

A man holding a bag and a clipboard showing a smiling face, a neutral face, a frowning face Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty. August 26, 2023, 7 AM ET Saved Stories

Not to boast, but my feedback is important. So important that, in the past couple of weeks alone, I’ve received a mountain of desperate requests for it.

Amazon, for example, wanted to know if I’d recommend its company based on my Amazon Returns experience. (When the pillow insert I was returning first arrived, the company also asked me to rate my delivery experience.) EGO Power+, the makers of my broken string trimmer, wanted to know if the callback I requested from them yesterday, and missed at 7 a.m. today, had solved my problem—would I complete a survey? When I opened DoorDash to order an acai bowl, the app prodded me to rate Carlos, the dasher who had, days earlier, delivered my Vietnamese noodles, on a five-star scale. An Etsy seller in India from whom I’d purchased a rug sent a fourth message on the app begging me to please rate and review: “It will help my business.” Later, DoorDash also hoped I’d rate the acai joint (separately from the dasher, whom I was also asked to rate). A difficult question; I’d thought the bowl came with fresh fruits, but it turned out I’d have needed to select them manually. Is that the acai bowlery’s fault, or the app operator’s? And why am I being asked to unwind the matter?

Friends, family, and colleagues report similar distress. After a doctor’s visit, one of them got bombarded with demands to review and rate the practice. He finally gave in and left a negative review—partly because it seemed like the office spent more time haranguing him for feedback than providing useful medical advice. Another reported a local market’s incessant demands that she review a nonalcoholic aperitif she once sampled and had utterly forgotten about.

This phenomenon has become so common as to swell into malaise. Data panhandling, let’s call it: a constant, unwelcome, and invasive demand that you provide feedback about everything, all the time. Each “request” is really just begging, an appeal for a favor without any expectation of benefit or reciprocity.

Read: Tipping is weird now

The root of the problem is that a request for your feedback isn’t actually a request for your feedback; it’s a means to accrue data of a certain kind, for a presumed purpose. For example, the demand to know “if you’d recommend us to a friend or colleague” indicates the pursuit of a market-research benchmark called “net promoter score,” a dumb business metric that persists because it’s easy to use, not because it has value. A doctor or dentist that asks for a rating is probably doing so to raise their local search-engine ranking, so that new patients can find their practice. Five-star reviews for retail or food-service delivery are more often used to lord power over poorly paid flex workers than to improve the service you encounter. If you feel alienated from requests for feedback, that’s because you are.

This dynamic is rarely better even when the underlying reason for the feedback request is clear. When the Etsy seller asked me for a review, he made an implicit truth explicit: Buyers look at ratings for trust, but platforms such as Etsy also use them to rank results. Rating the rug I bought is less about my expression of satisfaction than about helping a small business half a world away. That feels good until it feels bad again. How can a consumer be responsible for the livelihood of every individual who facilitates each transaction they perform?

On the one hand, rating them well costs you nothing. On the other hand, being asked to rate them implicates you in an economic circumstance for which you are not responsible. It’s easy to say, “Just don’t order online from companies that don’t treat their workers well.” But the alternatives are dwindling. When you buy a bauble or a burger, you now also receive an ambiguous position of power over the labor of others. That’s bad enough! But then the company that put you in that situation also begs you to help them further the ill treatment.

Then the demands for input multiply. Data-panhandler companies might implore you to review the delivery, the product delivered, the vendor that made it, the retailer or platform that sold it—and then maybe the support or return experience as well. What you might perceive to be a simple transaction with a singular company burgeons into a whole ecosystem of departments, divisions, partners, and providers, each with their own business objectives, bureaucracies, key performance indicators, and associated surveys, rankings, and metrics. But imposing the structure of a business on the consumer spreads corporate bureaucracy like a disease. Take my busted string trimmer as an example. I just want my lawn tool replaced under warranty. I don’t really care how that happens, and I certainly don’t want to stop to assess each email, phone call, customer-service rep, local repair partner, and freight-logistics service I might encounter along the way. Being asked to rate a phone call I didn’t even receive makes me feel insane.

Read: The free-returns party is over

And then it happens all the time, for everything you buy, forever. A $500 air fryer or a $5 power strip, a months-in-the-making medical procedure or a yen for crab rangoon—each demands rating on a five-point scale. The cognitive burden of such a life is overwhelming. No human can reasonably be asked to determine whether a pack of #10 × 1/2 wood screws offered a four-star or a five-star fastening experience. Acts of data panhandling impose on your time, but they also impinge on your autonomy. They demand justifications for who you are: Did the set of monstera-leaf bedsheets you bought make you happy? Are you a monstera-leaf-sheets kind of person after all? Every transaction is now also a therapy session gone awry.

Nobody likes to consider themselves a consumer. Not as an identity. I am not a buyer; I am a free man. But before the age of data panhandling, to wear the hat of a consumer at least afforded the freedom of anonymity. In some contexts, the richness of your life might fill a room; you were a registered nurse with a difficult teen, or a social worker with a macramé hobby, or a philandering stockbroker nevertheless committed to local youth baseball. But at the checkout, you were but a vessel voting with your wallet. You could shift in and out of that role, connecting it with your deeper motivations at times, ignoring them at others: Today you are buying a lawnmower because you were a man who tends to his lawn. But today you are also hungry because you are mortal, and a Cobb salad sounds both fresh and substantial. Your purchasing choices could be anonymous to the seller but also to yourself—who knows why you bought a Cobb salad today. You just did. The data panhandlers have stolen that from you.

It is no longer possible just to consume, for every consumer act comes with secret demands invoked only later. Even gratifying transactions—even forgettable ones—are now tainted, because to achieve them, you must evade the corporate hands reaching and mouths calling for you, unending, demanding your assessment, your opinion, your feedback, your review. Consumer life has ended, replaced, against all odds, by something worse.

Well Israel won't complain if people leave Palestine

Kate is my togo. With a terminal panel and latex->Unicode plugin is perfect for julia. I don't need it, but you can also set up its LSP client.

From what I understood, links to the conversation that have been created for sharing them.

I really like neostore. It also has Material You 😊

Maybe it's already there, but I'd like to browse other instances without creating an account, similarly to the anonymous view of Eternity for Lemmy.

I saw a Libreoffice community but wasn't very active.. so I thought here I could find users of the software and experts on the possible technical issue. Hope this doesn't bother too much.

How much time it takes to fill reimbursement forms. And how few professors/researchers discuss about teaching. (you got it, I work at a university).

Well it should be a reason IMHO.

I'd love to open links in browser, too!

Thanks a lot!!

I think it's right

Edit:

TIL: when saying random numbers, some people think to integers, others to real numbers.

Third party apps 😊

This might be revolutionary for infants, and this is great!

More recently, implanted sensors can provide continuous glucose monitoring without unpleasant pinpricks, but these devices can be less accurate for lower glucose levels and are not approved for children.

I'm using the public instance routinely, and it does the job well.

Guards Mamma! I'm part of the spike! 😊

«Empathy is the priority»

I know how compromises work, but the fact is we cannot let it be every time just because "they all have issues". Taking decisions based on beliefs is not an error, and I am in strong favor of this.

I did, last time two months ago. Unfortunately their presentation software is pretty minimal at the moment, and I prefer the fully open ODP standard. Anyways, at the time there was an issue with videos that weren't playing at all.

Love my Era

Totally unfair. Like the caring about privacy is a guilt. In case they fear this may be an issue to mantain order, they should really consider improving knowledge of these tools.

Love that app 😍

I would recommend MX Linux. It's solid and has a lot of nice and simple plus that are very much appreciated (a menu entries editor, some selected packages not available in debian, grub editor and helper, a very active and welcoming community)

I'm sure a lot of people will be infinitely thankful!!

I didn't know pocketbook was branded like this in France! Love them.

Well, I never refuse watching Pitch Perfect and The Dictator (by Sasha Baron Cohen). I'm sorry to lower the standard 😅

Well, we know this feeling very well here

Ugh do you think this will be a threat to the spirit of Mastodon?

This is really what I see missing. I am a reader more than a writer on Mastodon, and this is one of the major issues.

Congrats for your work!

I personally go for firefox on desktop (with AdGuard/UBlock) and with Mull (Firefox based) on mobile with the same extensions (yes, you can add practically any extension to firefox mobile).

If you prefer a chromium based browser, brave is fine, even if I don't like some of their choices. An alternative on mobile is mulch - that is based on chromium and available on fdroid.

Both mull and mulch are part of a privacy oriented project. I like firefox on phones more than chromium based, while on tablets it struggles IMHO.