I've always thought the best design for a star system would be a pair of positive/negative buttons, where the rating you give is the truncated logarithm of the number of times you press the button. So you can like or dislike things a little very easily, but you have to expend 10x as much effort to really like/dislike things, and 100x as much effort to express absolute adoration/hatred.
Effectively, this would be a "proof of emotional work": it's not a measure of your own subjective experience of your reaction to the product, but rather measuring your level of objectively-observable motivation to [dis]recommend the product. Which, I would think, would neatly get around all the arguments about "what it means" for something to be 3/4/5 stars—provoking a large number of people to click a like (or dislike!) button 10 times seems like a pretty good predictor of some objective property that the product has. (Whether that property is "quality" is up for debate.)
"Costly signaling theory from ecology posits that signals will be more honest and thus information will be accurately communicated when signaling carries a nontrivial cost. Our study combines this concept from behavioral ecology with methods of computational social science to show how costly signaling can improve crowd wisdom in human, online rating systems. Specifically, we endowed a rating widget with virtual friction to increase the time cost for reporting extreme scores. Even without any conflicts of interests or incentives to cheat, costly signaling helped obtain reliable crowd estimates of quality. Our results have implications for the ubiquitous solicitation of evaluations in e-commerce, and the approach can be generalized and tested in a variety of large-scale online communication systems."
Effectively, this would be a "proof of emotional work": it's not a measure of your own subjective experience of your reaction to the product, but rather measuring your level of objectively-observable motivation to [dis]recommend the product. Which, I would think, would neatly get around all the arguments about "what it means" for something to be 3/4/5 stars—provoking a large number of people to click a like (or dislike!) button 10 times seems like a pretty good predictor of some objective property that the product has. (Whether that property is "quality" is up for debate.)