My favorite is the one star review when it’s a shipping issue. “Look at this, the box is ripped!”

Five stars also means "this was just delivered to me and I haven't even used it yet".

I think the problem is partially the fault of companies that insist, at least where rated interactions with employees is concerned, that every interaction should be five stars, which in a system where the stars are all meaningful like this, is simply not realistically possible. This gives people the sense in general that rating anything that you don't completely dislike anything less than 5 stars is a bad thing to do, because it risks hurting some employee somewhere who doesn't deserve it.

Tbh, that different understanding doesn't matter much if you have enough reviews since it averages out.

If you compare two products with one review each, then yes, it hugely matters whether the one reviewer considered 5 stars as "expectations fullfilled" or "the best thing that happened to me ever".

But if you got >1k reviews, both sides will get equal amounts of both reviewer groups and it will average out so that both products will be compareable based on their stars.

That's a big misunderstanding many people have in regards to reviews. Many people are also afraid that unfair reviewers will skew the score. But since these unfair reviewers are usually spread equally over all products, it averages out as soon as you have a couple hundred reviews.

And that's also what that article criticises. It's much more important how many reviews an article has than the exact value. It's easy to get a straight 5-star rating if you have only a single review. It's much harder to do so if you have 10k reviews.

So the information value is: <100 or so reviews, the rating means little to nothing. >1000 reviews it can be usually trusted.

What it's really useful for, however, is reviews.

People don't buy 4-star reviews, and angry people don't give them. Those middle 3 stars are the reviews with reading.

To be fair, I think it is reasonable to rate things you have no complaints about as high as possible. If I see a rating with three stars, I assume that it was okay with a few rough spots. I like the idea that all products start out as five stars unless there is something really wrong, and you start knocking points for problems.