Technology

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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.

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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.

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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.