Essential reading for the New Year: "Crowd-Sourced Ratings and Why They Suck."

Steve Foolbody goes into detail to make a point running somewhat parallel to my thoughts from a recent diary entry.

Diary: The Taylor Swift Theory of RateAdvocate.

 ... I do know that my own use of non-beer ratings aggregators (florists, et al) generally bears little fruit. One tires of seeing a perfect five-star review posted adjacent to a hideous one-star pan, leading to an existential despair over the unfashionability of objective criteria.

He fluently demonstrates just how subjective the entire process really is, and more power to him for doing so.

Crowd-Sourced Ratings and Why They Suck (The Pour Fool)

... Crowd-sourced ratings – for anything; beer, whiskey, wine, chocolate, movies, restaurants, you name it – actually do the people they’re intended to help about as much good as they’d get from opening the yellow pages or a beverage catalog or standing in front of a store rack, closing their eyes, and picking at random.