Well, That Explains a Lot

Have you noticed that you are inundated by request for ratings whenever you use a service? 

Whether it's an online purchase, or a visit to the dentist, it seems that they are followed up by 3 or 4 requests to offer a rating of fill out an online survey.

It always seemed silly, but it turns out that there is a purpose to this, and it is somewhat nefarious.

They are not looking for your satisfaction with their good or service, they are looking for additional data for marketing purposes.

Everything these days seems to be another attempt to monetize your private information:

Not to boast, but my feedback is important. So important that, in the past couple of weeks alone, I’ve received a mountain of desperate requests for it.

………

Friends, family, and colleagues report similar distress. After a doctor’s visit, one of them got bombarded with demands to review and rate the practice. He finally gave in and left a negative review—partly because it seemed like the office spent more time haranguing him for feedback than providing useful medical advice. Another reported a local market’s incessant demands that she review a nonalcoholic aperitif she once sampled and had utterly forgotten about.

This phenomenon has become so common as to swell into malaise. Data panhandling, let’s call it: a constant, unwelcome, and invasive demand that you provide feedback about everything, all the time. Each “request” is really just begging, an appeal for a favor without any expectation of benefit or reciprocity.

The root of the problem is that a request for your feedback isn’t actually a request for your feedback; it’s a means to accrue data of a certain kind, for a presumed purpose. For example, the demand to know “if you’d recommend us to a friend or colleague” indicates the pursuit of a market-research benchmark called “net promoter score,” a dumb business metric that persists because it’s easy to use, not because it has value. A doctor or dentist that asks for a rating is probably doing so to raise their local search-engine ranking, so that new patients can find their practice. Five-star reviews for retail or food-service delivery are more often used to lord power over poorly paid flex workers than to improve the service you encounter. If you feel alienated from requests for feedback, that’s because you are.

………

It is no longer possible just to consume, for every consumer act comes with secret demands invoked only later. Even gratifying transactions—even forgettable ones—are now tainted, because to achieve them, you must evade the corporate hands reaching and mouths calling for you, unending, demanding your assessment, your opinion, your feedback, your review. Consumer life has ended, replaced, against all odds, by something worse.

It's depressing as hell.