

Ask HN: Best Rating System: Reddit-style or Amazon-style? - IsaacL

I'm planning on working on a web app over Summer. The core idea is for a site where people can post links to useful books (making money through the Amazon Associates scheme) or websites for learning skills, which are then ranked by quality and difficulty. EG, if you visit mywebsite.com/HTML, you'd probably see a link to w3schools.com at the top.<p>As my site isn't a news site, there's less of a need to 'bury' old links, which gives me a bit more flexibility in how content is rated. What do I use? A star-based voting system, such as Amazon and many others use, or a vote up/down system, as used by Hacker News, Reddit, etc? Though Reddit-style is simpler, I think the Amazon-style gives slightly more information.<p>There's also the possibility of a hybrid system (for example where down-votes = 0-star-votes, up-votes = 5-star-votes) though that isn't as intuitive and could confuse users.<p>Opinions? Which would you rather see?<p>Site 1: 4.87 stars<p>Site 2: 4.63 stars<p>Site 3: 4.56 stars<p>More information, but gets hard to understand with many sites.<p>Or:
Site 1: 312 up-votes<p>Site 2: 277 up-votes<p>Site 2: 213 up-votes<p>Simpler, but a bit vague. Is 200 up-votes good or bad?
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mattmcknight
The Amazon style is potentially better because it is naturally normalized by
the number of raters. It is useful to augment it with a number of raters so
that there is some weight given to sample size (4.5 stars by 2 raters might
mean less than 4.12 stars by 283 raters). I actually enjoy seeing the full
distribution with Amazon as there are many polarizing items that have lots of
fives and ones, but show up as three. It may also be useful to weight the
ratings by age when ranking, as things change over time, some sites and
content become less authoritative, others improve.

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imgabe
I think it depends on what you want to do with the rating information. If you
want to show the most popular sites/books, a simple liked/dislike system is
probably sufficient.

I think the 0 to 5 scale is more helpful if you want to be able to recommend
similar products. You can do that with the like/dislike system too, but I
think you get better results with a more granular scale, Reddit's
recommendation system, for example, is famously unhelpful.

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Travis
Don't forget that Amazon also allows you to rate the ratings, with their "Was
this review helpful to you?" link. While it doesn't affect the "score", it is
very helpful to bubble up/down people's reviews to show.

