Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

I went back to look at when they first changed from star ratings to like/dislike, and it seems like they were thinking about going even further and removing the dislike option entirely even back then.

They made some comments[1] before that change:

> Seems like when it comes to ratings it's pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference. Thus, the ratings system is primarily being used as a seal of approval, not as an editorial indicator of what the community thinks about a video. Rating a video joins favoriting and sharing as a way to tell the world that this is something you love.

> We're glad there are so many awesome videos on YouTube, but all of this begs the question: if the majority of videos are getting five stars, how useful is this system really? Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video?

[1]https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/five-stars-dominate-rat...

I'm still disappointed that they removed that feature. The star rating was superior.

At least in my personal observation, it seems like star ratings elsewhere on the internet (I'm thinking particularly of Airbnb and Google Maps reviews) are probably pretty close to bimodal: by and large, people essentially use five stars as a "like" button and one star as a "dislike." Assuming this is the case, a rating of 4.8 stars is essentially a way of saying "95% liked this": why not just strip out the extra abstraction and complexity and instead use a simpler like/dislike model, just like that YT blog post argues?

Of course, there are other situations where ratings between 1 and 5 stars _are_ informative: think critic reviews of movies, video, etc. But I think most crowdsourced reviews have kind of converged organically to a like/dislike model.

Whenever I look at a product that I am in doubt about I look into the reviews that gave it two or three stars.

It's like a secret communication channel were you don't have to listen to the paid raters at 5 or the angry mob shouting about how it didn't <something completely irrelevant> or how it arrive late because of customs.

In the same way I write a two star rating when I really dislike something so other smart people can easily find my message ;-)

I think there's an interesting nugget of sociology in that. Perhaps segmenting populations (not necessarily through ML, just a star rating or a ladder ranking or Likert scale could be enough) when rating something offers better visibility to people in that cohort about their shared attitudes in the matter.

1 = bots from competitors

2 = bad product

3 = average product

4 = good product

5 = bots from seller

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