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Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/26/opinion/sunday/26chen/26chen-facebookJumbo.jpg

Bon papier sur les évaluations en ligne.

Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

#E-commerce #Evaluation #Avis_utilisateurs

Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/26/opinion/sunday/26chen/26chen-facebookJumbo.jpg

Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/26/opinion/sunday/26chen/26chen-facebookJumbo.jpg

Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

The Fidget Spinner Is the Perfect Toy for the Trump Presidency - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-fidget-spinner-is-the-perfect-toy-for-the-trump-presidency

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Mead-The-Fidget-Spinner-1200-630.jpg

But the current explosion of popularity in fidget toys extends well beyond children with a diagnosis, as those teachers nationwide—nay, internationally—who have been banning them from their classrooms could surely attest; they have become a universally desirable accessory for tween-aged students. They function, in their seductive tactility, like cigarettes for kids who are still young enough to find smoking completely disgusting. The measure of the craze can be taken with a quick scan of Amazon rankings: a recent search revealed that forty-nine of the fifty best-selling toys were either fidget spinners or fidget cubes. (The only non-fidget-based toy in Amazon’s top fifty sellers was an obscene party card game for adults, with the uplifting name Cards Against Humanity.) No longer a fringe occupation, fidgeting is for all, not just for the few.

This marks a significant evolution—or devolution, if you prefer—in the cultural status of fidgeting. Until very recently, fidgeting was invariably an activity with a pejorative connotation. It was something kids were supposed to stop doing.

This reëvaluation of fidgeting certainly legitimizes the surge in popularity of the fidget spinner, but it does not entirely explain it. Why spinning? And why now? The invention of the spinner has been credited to Catherine Hettinger, described by the Guardian as “a Florida-based creator,” who registered a patent for a finger-spinning toy back in 1997 but was unable at the time to interest toy companies in its marketability. Unfortunately for Hettinger, she allowed the patent to lapse and, therefore, is not profiting from the current craze. (In truth, the spinners currently dominating the market—which are shaped like ergonomic ninja stars—bear only a conceptual resemblance to Hettinger’s prototype, which looks as if it might be a contraceptive diaphragm designed for a whale.)

At the time that Hettinger was floating her invention, a very different craze was making its first inroads into the handheld-toy marketplace. The Tamagotchi, which was launched first in Japan and then globally, was a so-called digital pet, which required certain attentions from its owner to thrive.

Compared with the fidget spinner, the Tamagotchi is a marvel of complexity, stimulating imagination and engendering empathy. Go back even further, to the nineteen-eighties, and you find the Rubik’s Cube, a toy that offers all the haptic satisfaction offered by a fidget spinner, and also combines it with a brainteaser of such sophistication that many of us are little closer to solving it than we were thirty-five years ago.

More recent fads compare favorably, in the cognitive-demand department, to the fidget spinner, too. The Rainbow Loom required considerable dexterity to produce those little bracelets worn by everyone who was between the ages of six and eleven in 2013.

The fidget spinner, it could be argued, is the perfect toy for the age of Trump. Unlike the Tamagotchi, it does not encourage its owner to take anyone else’s feelings or needs into account. Rather, it enables and even encourages the setting of one’s own interests above everyone else’s. It induces solipsism, selfishness, and outright rudeness. It does not, as the Rubik’s Cube does, reward higher-level intellection. Rather, it encourages the abdication of thought, and promotes a proliferation of mindlessness, and it does so at a historical moment when the President has proved himself to be pathologically prone to distraction and incapable of formulating a coherent idea.

#gadget #pratiques_sociales #adolescents #enfants #métaphore