it would be even better if they stopped proactively pushing a rating prompt and defaulted to 'no rating' which means 'everything is fine'. provide the thumbs up/down in the app that people can use for the situations where it was noteworthy enough to go out of your way to register a vote.

and it might be better to drop the thumbs-up option as well. the rating ecosystems have evolved to a point where the stars aren't a bipolar rating scale from bad->acceptable->great but rather a unipolar scale from bad->acceptable. there's a good chance that the same would happen with thumbs up/down, so why not just jump to the inveitable endpoint of "ratings are only used to report adverse events"?

Back when Foursquare was more popular, I always felt their ratings were much more accurate than Yelp’s. They use(d?) a ternary neutral/thumbs up/thumbs down.

Not sure of their algorithm to generate a score of 1-10 – it’s possible it used more information than just the ternary rating — but their ratings could vary dramatically from sites like Yelp that used the usual 1-5 stars, and seemed to track much more closely to the actual quality of restaurants.

One of Uber's competitors have a 5 star system where 4 and 5 stars show you a few options below with the title "What did you like?". Those are optional. for 3 and 2 they will show "What was the issue?" and you have to write a shot message describing the issue. And for 1 they show no options but will call you and ask what was so terrible about your ride.

> And for 1 they show no options but will call you and ask what was so terrible about your ride.

That sounds like a very effective way of getting riders to never leave a 1 under any circumstance.

I agree with this, although I wouldn't bother with the rationale. It's either you had an overall good experience or an overall bad experience. I'd add a third option called "favorite" or "star" which you could you only give out to 10 drivers/restaurants/places at a time to highlight really exceptional experiences.