Tea Ratings Question

I think that when a tea has only one or two ratings it is skewed towards an average. They don’t want a tea to have only one or two ratings and end up the top rated tea on Steepster.

Because it’s not plain average. This is on purpose. It’s so that it’s more difficult for cheaters to articifically press ratings up on their own product and down on the competition’s. It also means that if 20 people really liked something and rated it high and one person really disliked it and rated it low, that one low rating wouldn’t have so large an impact compared to the many high ratings. And, of course, vice versa.

There’s more information about the Bayesian Average in their blog post here. http://blog.steepster.com/post/247562587/brewing-a-better-rating-system-the-2nd-steep