

Ask HN: What is the best rating system? - jpn

Bonjournal is a journaling app that helps you document and share your travels.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bonjourn.al<p>We are thinking of adding a rating system so that users can rate the places they visit. Think journaling meets Yelp &#x2F; Foursquare.<p>Obviously no rating system is going to be perfect. Yelp uses the five star system. Foursquare uses a 10 point scale. We are leaning toward letter grades.<p>Why I like letter grades:<p>1) Precision: A, A-, A-&#x2F;B+, B+
2) Less ambiguous: I have a strong understanding of what a B vs a B+ means...not so much with 6.5 vs 7 or 3.5 stars vs 4. Perhaps that is just me.
3) Widely adopted: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grading_systems_by_country<p>However, we&#x27;re not 100% sold, and wanted to ask the HN community.<p><i></i>* What rating system do you prefer and why? <i></i>*<p>Some references:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;09&#x2F;22&#x2F;youtube-comes-to-a-5-star-realization-its-…
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Is-there-a-better-alternative-to-the-5-star-rating-sys…
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;How-reliable-is-the-100-point-scoring-system-for-choo…
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icosa
Shannon Appelcline has a great overview of rating, ranking, and other systems
in the article series "Collective Choice":
[http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT_/TTnT_178.phtml](http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT_/TTnT_178.phtml)
. The key points are that most people want to be nice so you'll have far more
activity in the top half of the ratings (3-5 for 5 stars, 6-10 for 10 stars);
explicitly describing what each level means makes people more accurate; and
instead of using a simple average you should weight it towards the site
average to prevent items with few ratings from being misrepresented (e.g. an
item with one 5-star rating is not the best ever).

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pjungwir
Whatever scale you use, this article has good advice on how to compute each
item's total score for sorting purposes:

[http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-
rating....](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html)

~~~
jpn
Thanks. This is a great find.

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bilalhusain
aside: I was going to refer the goodfilms blog post[1] but decided to check
quora first (I've stopped using it because of their login/read only first
answer) and there it was! (and it appears that quora has removed the gating)

Also, can you make your references clickable?

[1] [http://goodfil.ms/blog/posts/2011/10/07/a-better-way-to-
rate...](http://goodfil.ms/blog/posts/2011/10/07/a-better-way-to-rate-films)

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thewarrior
I think it would be better to ask the user to compare a place against a few
others he has visited and use that to automatically compute a rating. But
thats not as usable.

Another option would be to ask him to fill in a few questions.Then compute the
rating using that.

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hackerboos
Building Web Reputation Systems:

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596159801.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596159801.do)

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LarryMade2
I like how Amazon does it, with stars and comments. That way you can look at
the stars given and then add in the grain of salt by the quality of the
associated comment.

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J_Darnley
Amazon also gives (or used to give) you a helpful tooltip of what they want
each star to mean. I think they were: I love, I like it, It's okay, I don't
like it, I hate it. I've started using it for 5-point scales and a with a
slight adjustment for 10-point scales. If I would say one of those things
about an item that is the rating I give.

Another good thing about Amazon's ratings is that you can see a breakdown of
points. A 3-star item with 20 3-star reviews is likely to be quite different
to an item with 10 1-star and 10 5-star reviews.

Although if I was a "professional" doing reviews, I would probably use a grade
system of A-C and F.

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gesman
I actually like 5 star rating system for simplicity with an added ability to
rate at 1/2 star intervals if wanted to.

