The rating goes from 1-5 not because the novel was great or bad but because there are more people rating 1 or more people rating 5.
There are quite a number of novel that should be in the 4.0 but was downrated to 3.5 because the readers do not like reading sad story. ?
If you don't like reading sad story, keep that to yourself.
It's like people saying Indian spicy curry is bad because they do not like spicy food.
Satan's horns! Your personal preference is absolutely irrelevant to the quality of a novel so keep that completely out of the rating.
This is the case for online ratings in general these days. People tend to give a 1 star when they just didn't like it and give a 5 when they enjoyed it despite it being rather mediocre. I think the people that give scores from 2 to 4 stars actually trying to give the thing they are rating a reasoned score are actually the minority.
Go on a food delivery app and you'll find McDonalds with like a 4.5/5 stars as if the food McDonalds serves is high quality food. Any realistic score would give it like a 3 stars and people should be willing to try something that is 3 stars as long as the price is commensurate, but that's just not how things work.
I blame the companies that have gotten reviewers to skew their scores on things like movies and games by tempting them with early access, special screenings and goodies or straight up advertising dollars to inflate scores. This has just eventually bled over to the general consumer viewing scores the same way. Most people view 5/10 and below as just absolute garbage dumpster-fire. 5-6/10 is bad. 6-7/10 is barely passable. 7-9/10 is good. 9/10 or higher is great. Half of the rating scale has become obsolete since it all means the same.
Another issue is a lot of sites allowing the author/company to moderate their own reviews. This happens on Amazon(which is why these days most of the stuff on Amazon is trash), but also WN. As an author have removed legitimately bad reviews that shouldn't be there, but there are also lots of authors that just delete anything below a 3 regardless of how well thought out the review is just to inflate their score to try to draw more readers.
The end result is that generally if something is rated below 4 stars I expect there is a good chance it will be shit despite 3-4 stars still really should mean something good.
