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Comment by dazc | Hacker News Reader

"Airbnb makes personal connections but uses online reviews to keep people honest: after our stay, we reviewed our host and he reviewed us."

The host reviews you after you have reviewed him/her. This is a big disincentive to leave a bad review, especially when you haven't already established a good reputation for yourself.

I've used Airbnb 3 times and, if I were being honest, I wouldn't have given any of them a good review.

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This is incorrect. The host cannot see your review until they have left you a review and vice versa.

Not been my experience; where someone has left a bad review they seem to have got one back.

Yeah because often times a bad experience is bidirectional

Rating inflation is always a worry, but maybe they hope it will come out in the wash once you have a large enough population?

I don't know. Any of these peer rating systems seem to devolve to give 5 stars unless they did something horribly bad and wrong.

Back when eBay was more of an online flea market, the culture was certainly that anything other than a glowing A+++++++++ positive was a black mark that people took as indicating you actively swindled someone. And retaliatory low ratings were certainly a thing people discussed.

And, with Uber, I'm acutely aware that even somewhat lower ratings can have a big impact on drivers so I'm not that inclined to give 4 star rather than 5 star ratings even when the service is a little bit subpar.

Yes, maybe instead of a 5 star system we really need:

   * exceeds expectations
   * met expectations
   * did not meet expectations

And then just ding the folks in the last category.

Because what we have right now is really:

   * 5 stars == exceeded or met expectations
   * < 5 stars == did not meet expectations

However, it still won't address the issue of mutual rating. What you really need to do there is have the ratings hidden from each other until both have been submitted, and, frankly, not to penalize either side for ratings unless they are consistently negative. The latter is the only way to make them constructive rather than destructive.

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