While it sometimes rankles me when my widgets get 1 point ratings, it turns out the collective wisdom of the crowd tends to dilute that and the overall consensus isn't too bad.  I would say that objectively "good" stuff seems to rise to the top, while widgets of obvious marginal quality seem to get low ratings.

Looking at the patterns, some people seem to rate on the basis of some vague notion of "usefulness", while others rate on the basis of technical execution, and others seem to rate on the basis of "novelty".  Some widgets get wildly disparate ratings, exposing a sort of "love/hate" that some people have for certain widgets - "Screen Clean", for instance, is generally highly regarded, but some people absolutely hate it - do they hate dogs, or is it just that the widget itself is profoundly useless, or that's it's technically trivial?

I've taken a look at the ratings table, and most people do tend to use the full range - they don't stick to just "1" or "5".  The only thing that's universal is that widget authors give their own widgets "5"s.

We have talked about the rating system quite a bit in house - I guess the problem is that it's hard to get consensus what the various rating categories should be, and in some cases, some would be quite controversial.  I''ve also noticed that in most of the multi-axis rating systems out there, they *always* create a merged rating that they use for sorting.  That would seem to dilute any value that separate ratings might have.

Please keep giving us your thoughts on this issue.

I really, really hope my first "ratings rant" is buried deep-deep-deep in the system .  I got schooled pretty good by Duane.  He made me the man I am today.

Your widget is really cool BTW.  Looking forward to more!

Cheers.

Yes, we've noticed that - English speakers giving Japanese widgets low ratings simply because they're Japanese.  It's probably best to just ignore a widget that's obviously designed for another country.

We considered putting users from other countries on different servers with entirely parallel sets of widgets, however, it quickly became apparent that many widgets are "universal" - many of the widgets that are popular in the original catalog are also popular in Japan, plus US users might miss a really cool widget.  Rather than segregate at the server level, we hoped that putting up a "Japan" category would be enough for users that aren't interested in Japanese widgets to avoid them.