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Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

I feel a better system is just thumbs up/thumbs down. Either it was satisfactory, or it wasn't.

Basically the same as our current 5 star/1 star dichotomy but it makes things more clear to people who are tempted to give 4 stars.

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Even though it seems like shrinking the available options will lead to less fine-grained data, sometimes it seems like it actually works out better. I really liked how Four Square only had thumbs up and thumbs down as the allowed ratings. I feel like it did a very good job of capturing how aligned with expectations the restaurant experience was. It also made it really painless to give feedback.

Yup, I really miss UrbanSpoon for the same reason (now owned by zomato and totally ruined). I found it's percent-thumbs-up metric to be so much more valuable than Yelp's 5-star average. If you really want a finer-grained system, have multiple thumbs-up, thumbs-downs.

YouTube originally had a five star rating system for each video but switched to the current thumbs up/down system. I believe the reason given was that almost all viewers either give five stars or one star, which made the middle three ratings pointless.

I changed my music player/library from the default 5-star rating system to a 1-star system, basically replicating the "like"/"save" functionality from Spotify. It makes it easier to handle, because I don't have to think about whether I like this particular song 4 stars or the full 5 stars.

I just mark favorite tracks and favorite albums. The track and album ratings are separate, because I might love an album as a whole, but also have a couple of individual favorite tracks on that album.

And I don't have any music in my collection that I don't like or am completely "meh" about. If it's in my library, I already love it, the question is whether it's an all-time favorite or not.

How do we make a single thumbs down not trigger a 5 alarm fire in the customer service department? Anyone else dread the onslaught of follow up from a company after you give a bad rating?

Is there a dichotomy? I don't see the 1 star being more common than 2 or 3.

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