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How to Make Easy & Flexible Star Ratings

nerds.airbnb.com

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Re: How to Make Easy & Flexible Star Ratings

#21

Post by Aloisius »

llgrrl_ wrote: post #17

This is the code that should go to the server side for calculating star ratings: Star Ratings I’ve been awfully busy programming lately. My Django-based side project is coming along well and I hope to have it ready for use in a few weeks. Please don’t ask more about it, that’s really all I can say for now. Anyways, I came across an interesting little math problem today and was hoping some skilled programmers out ther…

Can't you just internally multiple everything by 2, average the whole thing, round, then divide by 2 to get half point ratings?

  stars = round(star_sum * 2 / num_raters)/2

Re: How to Make Easy & Flexible Star Ratings

#22

Post by jeiting »

llgrrl_ wrote: post #17

This is the code that should go to the server side for calculating star ratings: Star Ratings I’ve been awfully busy programming lately. My Django-based side project is coming along well and I hope to have it ready for use in a few weeks. Please don’t ask more about it, that’s really all I can say for now. Anyways, I came across an interesting little math problem today and was hoping some skilled programmers out ther…

Have you tried a recursive solution?

def round_to_half(x): if ( x 7) { return 1.0; } else { return 0.5 } } else { return round_to_half(x/10); } }

x = star_sum/num_raters dec = round_to_half(x) x = floor(x/10) + dec

This way you look smarter for using recursion.

Re: How to Make Easy & Flexible Star Ratings

#23

Post by samstokes »

gwillen wrote: post #5
mhartl wrote: post #3

This is a great discussion of the mechanics of rendering star ratings in a browser. I'd love to see a companion theory post on how to intelligently compute and rank such ratings. The arithmetic mean is notoriously sensitive to outliers, and the consequences are sometimes severe: I know a resort in Thailand that used to be ranked #1 on TripAdvisor on its island (Koh Phangan), only to fall to #17 after a 1-star review.…

Use the algorithm given here: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

Also the response article at http://masanjin.net/blog/how-to-rank-products-based-on-user-... is interesting.

Re: How to Make Easy & Flexible Star Ratings

#24

Post by pothibo »

I liked how you guys present some of the stuff you create. However, I'm not a huge fan of star rating. I know it's in use everywhere but I feel that it's such a flawed rating system that we need to think twice before using star ratings.

I think that Facebook's like is a good concept that can replace stars rating (a like is a like, no negative feedbacks, and you know that you either like something or you didn't).

Star ratings is too complex, I mean, something I rate 4 star is very different than somebody else's 4 star rating.

Maybe this isn't the place to discuss this but I wanted to let the word out ;)

Re: How to Make Easy & Flexible Star Ratings

#25

Post by mikehearn »

pothibo wrote: post #24

I liked how you guys present some of the stuff you create. However, I'm not a huge fan of star rating. I know it's in use everywhere but I feel that it's such a flawed rating system that we need to think twice before using star ratings. I think that Facebook's like is a good concept that can replace stars rating (a like is a like, no negative feedbacks, and you know that you either like something or you didn't). Star…

This is touched on in some of the other posts, so I won't belabor the point, but the issue with only positive feedback is that there isn't a way to identify items that are popular but also controversial.

For example, an Airbnb venue with 5,000 likes would be considered 'better' than one with 500. But add in negative feedback, and consider if the same venue with 5,000 likes also had 4,500 dislikes, while the venue with 500 likes only had 50 dislikes.

Negative feedback helps us discern between if something is 'better' or simply 'popular' -- the latter can be gamed with marketing, while the former is much harder.

Re: How to Make Easy & Flexible Star Ratings

#28

Post by swah »

pothibo wrote: post #24

I liked how you guys present some of the stuff you create. However, I'm not a huge fan of star rating. I know it's in use everywhere but I feel that it's such a flawed rating system that we need to think twice before using star ratings. I think that Facebook's like is a good concept that can replace stars rating (a like is a like, no negative feedbacks, and you know that you either like something or you didn't). Star…

I actually like 5 stars: 3 is average, then 4 above average, etc. I just don't like that you can't give 0 stars.

Re: How to Make Easy & Flexible Star Ratings

#29

Post by ajtaylor »

mikehearn wrote: post #25
pothibo wrote: post #24

I liked how you guys present some of the stuff you create. However, I'm not a huge fan of star rating. I know it's in use everywhere but I feel that it's such a flawed rating system that we need to think twice before using star ratings. I think that Facebook's like is a good concept that can replace stars rating (a like is a like, no negative feedbacks, and you know that you either like something or you didn't). Star…

This is touched on in some of the other posts, so I won't belabor the point, but the issue with only positive feedback is that there isn't a way to identify items that are popular but also controversial. For example, an Airbnb venue with 5,000 likes would be considered 'better' than one with 500. But add in negative feedback, and consider if the same venue with 5,000 likes also had 4,500 dislikes, while the venue wit…

That is a great point. At $work, we're about to revamp how we do ratings. The idea was to only consider positive feedback, but maybe we should figure out how to include negative feedback too. But that brings up the question of how to avoid the spammers, scammers and idiots that inevitably popup?

Re: How to Make Easy & Flexible Star Ratings

#30

Post by ajtaylor »

mhartl wrote: post #3

This is a great discussion of the mechanics of rendering star ratings in a browser. I'd love to see a companion theory post on how to intelligently compute and rank such ratings. The arithmetic mean is notoriously sensitive to outliers, and the consequences are sometimes severe: I know a resort in Thailand that used to be ranked #1 on TripAdvisor on its island (Koh Phangan), only to fall to #17 after a 1-star review.…

Thanks to the above comments for all the links! I'm about to start on a new project at $work, for which I think those postings will be very useful.
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