Can We Please Use the Whole Rating Scale?

It sure has been a while since I wrote something on this blog. I should probably do that. Therefore, I have decided to write something of substance rather than just jot down a bunch of words for the sake of filling the post with… something.

Seriously, can we just use the whole scale when rating something? I don’t care which scale you use; just use the whole scale! Almost every time, assuming a 10-point scale, I see something like this:

Rating	Descriptive equivalent
< 7	Okayish or just trash
7	Good
8	Gooder
9	Goodest
10	Default rating

Your typical brainlet’s rating system.

Anything below a 7 is either passable or complete garbage; there is apparently no use for any of the ratings below 7 unless the game is just absolute trash, in which case, a rating of 0 or 1 is used. If a game would be a 5, it’s just a 1. Period. Here is some Python-style pseudocode representing these brainlets’ thinking process:

MIN_RATING = 7

def apply_rating(self, ratee: Rateable, rating: int) -> None:
	ratee.rate(self, MIN_RATING if rating < MIN_RATING else rating)

Meanwhile, here’s how the rating system should look:

Rating	Descriptive equivalent
0	Absolute trash nobody should bother watching/playing/reading/…
1	Garbage fit only for the most gullible and low-standard of people.
2	Just bad.
3	Not very good.
4	It’s… alright, I guess.
5	Just about average.
6	Decent.
7	Hey, this is pretty good!
8	Wow.
9	Dude, this shouldn’t even be able to exist.
10	Absolute perfection.

My brainlet self’s rating system.

Mapping this to any other point scale (e.g. 1-5 or 0-100) is trivial: simply adjust the intervals accordingly.

Note that this scale is not linear; it may appear linear in the middle, but, really, it should be considered that items rated by this system are distributed along some inversely exponential distribution (i.e. something roughly like L(r) = e^-Cr, where e is Euler’s number, r is the rating (variable), C is some constant, and L(r) is some descriptor of how likely it is for a given rating r to be assigned). Going from 0 to 1 on this scale is extremely easy, 4 to 5 moderately difficult, and 9 to 10 a practical impossibility.

I know it’s probably difficult, and this apparent rateardation [sic] is most certainly why websites like YouTube and Netflix moved away from value-based rating systems in favor of a binary upvote-downvote system. This is why people despise the so-called “normies.”

I can’t believe I returned after five months of absence to bring up something like this, but there you go. Give the normies something to chew on and make the world a better place where we can abstain from the inferior binary rating systems. Just use the scale correctly, already!