Everyone’s a 4.8
We rate everything now: drivers, restaurants, apps, coworkers. Approval got cheap, and cheap approval turns into a commodity that can’t tell anyone apart. Here’s how it happens, and how to stop it.
It’s the same everywhere
Grades, eBay, LinkedIn, GitHub. Wherever people rate each other, the scores crowd the top. Even a simple yes, like an endorsement or a referral, piles up until the count says little.
Each grid is 100 stars. Gold is the share at the top of each scale. Hotels, rated as businesses, are the exception. All sources
- Harvard grades that are A’s: 24 percent in 2005, 60.2 percent in 2025.
- eBay feedback that is positive, for the average seller: 99.3 percent.
- LinkedIn endorsements and GitHub stars can only say yes: 100 percent.
- Airbnb listings rated 4.5 or higher in 2015: 94 percent. TripAdvisor hotels: 26 percent.
Take one example. What’s the typical Airbnb rating?
Think of a place with at least 10 reviews, rated out of 5, and drag the star to your guess.
The typical Airbnb listing in San Francisco and New York with at least 10 reviews is rated 4.84 out of 5. Half of these places are rated 4.84 or higher, and fewer than 1 in 100 falls below 4.
So the ratings stop finding the best people
Here are 80 simulated coworkers rating each other. Black dots are the 10 most skilled. Gold stars are the 10 you’d hire by score. You want them on the same people.
The fix: praise has to point at real work
When a vouch has to point at something real the person made, it’s hard to fake. Tap any set of rules below to run it on the same 80 people.
This chart needs JavaScript. In our simulation, of the 10 most skilled people, the top 10 by score finds about 8 with everything together, about 6 when praise is tied to real work or with Cosign-style rules, about 5 with written reviews, hidden reviews or saying how you know someone, about 5 with one-click likes, and about 2 with LinkedIn-style endorsements. Guessing finds about 1. These are simulated, not measured.
How this works
- 80 pretend coworkers. Each one is secretly good or not so good at their job.
- Every round, they rate each other. Some ratings are honest, some are just being nice.
- We check: do the highest-rated people turn out to be the best ones? Black dots are the best. Gold stars are the highest rated.
This lab needs JavaScript. In the simulation, with one-click ratings that everyone can see, the scores drift up toward 5, and the top 10 by score holds only about half of the 10 most skilled people. When every rating points at real work, the scores stay spread out, and the top 10 holds most of them.
What this means for a cosign
Most ratings, referrals and endorsements count every vote the same. People don’t. A yes from someone whose judgment you trust, written with care, is worth more than a pile of taps.
That’s what Cosign is built around: named yeses, and who said yes and why. The next step is tying each yes to the work itself.