Thoughts on star ratings for books?

I'm used to the GoodReads system and it works for me, except there's no way to convey with a number the huge difference between "I expected this to be a fun, easy read and it was, 3 stars!" and "I expected better from this author and it was uneven and a bit of a slog, 3 stars."

I mostly stoped using ratings because of this, except for my personal reading log. And it makes it hard to know what to recommend to people when they ask.

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@willaful

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Stars are fine if accompanied by a short reasoning why. Imo.

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@Hayob
Yeah, second that. At least if I want to understand what a specific person's rating means, I like the comment. Also for that case, it helps to see how they rate things generally.

OTOH, for an aggregate...yeah I just actively thought about it and it's different for different types of books. I'm more sensitive to 2 vs 3 vs 4 for a technical book, but not so much for 4 vs 5. For a novel, setting aside dog-piling and controversy skewing things negative, I might pay attention if it's getting 1 or 2, but 3-5 is all in the noise.

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