Terry Godier, who recently launched an RSS reader called Current (which is very good!), has encountered an unavoidable and unsolvable problem: in the five-star review system, anything below five is a disaster, and so what are we even doing here?
Godier’s observation, shared publicly, strikes at the heart of a chronic dysfunction that has plagued app stores, e-commerce sites, and review platforms for years. The five-star scale, originally designed to provide nuanced feedback, has devolved into a binary PR tool: anything less than five stars damages a product’s perceived quality, regardless of the reviewer’s intent. This phenomenon is not limited to small indie apps like Current; it affects everything from blockbuster games to kitchen appliances.
The Psychology of the 4-Star Review
You will see a lot of 4-star reviews that say things like, “This is my favorite app!” or “Gamechanger!” The apps that tend to have these types of reviews are often over a 4.0 in the store and are being actively harmed average-wise by having them, even though the intent was clearly not to do so. Why does this happen? Because reviewers often use the 5-star scale as if it were a 10-point or 100-point system, where 4 out of 5 (80%) seems like a great score. But in the algorithmic aggregation that app stores use, a 4-star rating significantly drags down the average, especially when the vast majority of users who bother to rate at all give 5 stars. A handful of 4-star reviews can drop an app from an average of 4.8 to 4.5, which in the mind of a prospective user (or a developer’s marketing team) turns a stellar product into merely “okay.”
This cognitive mismatch comes from a common human bias: we tend to anchor on the top of a scale. The same user who gives 4 stars because they “really like” the app would never give 8 out of 10 on a different scale. But the five-star scale conflates numeric stars with qualitative grades — 4 stars feels like a B+ or A- when in reality, for a product to maintain a high average, virtually every rating must be 5 stars. The result is that sincere positive feedback paradoxically harms the product it aims to support.
How We Got Here: The History of Ratings
Star ratings predate the internet. They became popular with consumer guides like the Michelin Guide, which used one to three stars to denote exceptional quality. But the modern five-star system gained prominence with online retailers like Amazon and later Apple’s App Store and Google Play. These platforms chose five stars as a compromise between granularity and simplicity. In theory, it allows for shades of opinion: one star for terrible, three for average, five for excellent. In practice, it encourages extreme ratings. The base-rate problem is severe: most users only rate when they love or hate something, so the distribution is U-shaped. Moreover, the algorithm that computes the displayed average is often a simple arithmetic mean, which gives equal weight to a 1-star rant and a 5-star rave — but the 1-star is far more vivid in a buyer’s mind.
Platform incentives exacerbate the issue. App stores rank apps partly by their average rating, so developers are strongly incentivized to beg for 5 stars specifically. Many apps now include “rate us” prompts that only appear after a positive interaction, and some even gate features behind 5-star reviews (a practice frowned upon but widespread). This creates an arms race: users become numb to review requests, and those who comply often default to 5 stars uncritically, further inflating everything above 4.5. The result is a system where almost nothing is below 4 stars, yet the difference between 4.5 and 4.8 can decide an app’s visibility.
The Case of Current and the RSS Revival
Godier’s RSS reader Current is a case in point. Built with modern design and features like smart folders and offline reading, it has received excellent reviews from tech journalists and early adopters. But as Godier noted, even those glowing reviews — “4 stars, love it!” — drag down its store rating. This is not a problem unique to Current; indie apps, where the developers are emotionally and financially invested in every rating, feel this most acutely. The current review system is not just broken for developers; it misleads users. A potential user sees a 4.4 rating and may think the app is flawed, but the actual feedback is overwhelmingly positive. The rating becomes a noisy signal rather than a reliable summary.
This is especially relevant in the RSS space, which has seen a quiet resurgence in recent years. As Twitter and other centralized platforms lose trust, many power users and professionals are returning to RSS to curate their own information streams. Apps like Current, NetNewsWire, and Reeder compete not just on features but on the trust of their small, vocal user bases. A broken rating system disproportionately hurts these niche products because they lack the volume of reviews to withstand a few 4-star ratings.
Alternatives: What Could Fix the System?
Several alternatives have been proposed. The most common is a simple binary like/dislike or thumbs-up/thumbs-down. This is used by YouTube and many streaming services. It eliminates the “5-star inflation” because there is only one positive option. However, it also removes nuance: a video that is “pretty good” gets the same treatment as a “masterpiece.” Another alternative is a sliding scale or a percentage, but these can also lead to anchor bias. Some platforms (like Google Play) now show the distribution of ratings (e.g., 80% 5-star, 10% 4-star) rather than just the average, giving users more context. But this is still gamed by prompted 5-star reviews.
Another radical approach is to abandon public ratings entirely, as some premium apps have done. Instead, they rely on editorial reviews, word-of-mouth, or trial periods. This removes the incentive to manipulate ratings, but it also removes a quick heuristic for users. A middle ground, used by some niche review aggregators, is to only count reviews from verified purchasers or to weight reviews by the reviewer’s credibility. But these systems are complex to implement and can raise privacy concerns.
Ultimately, the five-star review system is broken because it asks users to do something unnatural: compress a multi-dimensional experience into a single number, and then treats that number as though it has linear meaning. The psychology of rating, the economics of store rankings, and the design of the interface all conspire to make anything below 5 stars feel like a punishment. Terry Godier’s exhibit 472,304 is just one of many, but it captures the frustration succinctly. Until platforms redesign their feedback loops, developers and users alike will remain trapped in a system where 4 stars is not a compliment, but a wound.
Source: The Verge News