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I've gotten the impression there's a definite tendency for readers to sort of follow the leader when it comes to rating a new story. When you click and see a rating of a low four or high six whatever, you go in with certain expectations and biases, and so the first few people to rate are going to have a strong impact on how a story is received.

My suggestion is that ratings on a story are hidden until it's received a certain number of them from readers going in without anything but the story itself influencing their opinion. (Ten seems like a good number, but I'm not set on it.)

It doesn't particularly matter to me if they're hidden from the author as well or just the readers, whatever's easier to implement I suppose. I'm just really curious whether we would start seeing any kind of changing trends in how stories are rated based on this.

Thanks for this, I suspect the anchoring effect is all too real