How to Money · Monday, July 13, 2026
Hosts Joel and Matt discuss the phenomenon of "rating inflation" on platforms like Airbnb and Uber, where review scores are often clustered at the high end, making it difficult to distinguish genuinely good experiences from mediocre ones. They share personal anecdotes about receiving subpar service despite high ratings and express frustration over the lack of nuance in review systems.
“What has happened is instead of having the running the full gamut of between one and five stars, truly, they've condensed it to this tiny little sliver of all right, really, we're only going to operate within this four and a half to five star range because anything beyond that is just absolutely terrible. Yeah, which I hate.”
“So it's funny because when we stay in Orlando over this past summer, I remember seeing almost this exact same thing on the fridge there and it just made me laugh because I was like, that's just silly.”
“And so what they're trying to do is push you in the direction of leaving a five stars.”