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dang

How not to sort by average rating (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29200103 - Nov 2021 (82 comments)

How Not to Sort by Average Rating (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131611 - Aug 2017 (156 comments)

How Not to Sort by Average Rating (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855784 - July 2015 (59 comments)

How Not To Sort By Average Rating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3792627 - April 2012 (153 comments)

How Not To Sort By Average Rating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1218951 - March 2010 (31 comments)

How Not To Sort By Average Rating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478632 - Feb 2009 (56 comments)

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With this many prior discussions here, I guess the only question to ask is: Are any major sites using this method, or at least providing a way to combine sort with a filter items with under X ratings.

If anything, it seems like the likes of Amazon are making it harder to sort and filter, using dark patterns to direct you to their preferred products.

Amazon's product search is largely useless, at least in the UK, now. It typically returns many items that don't include your search term, are outside the price range you specified and are not sorted in the order you asked for. The top half the list being "sponsored" items is just the enshittified cherry on the turd cake.

Also it’s now basically impossible to find the "usual" brands of a product if you don’t know them.

What I mean is, let’s say I want to buy an alarm clock. I don’t want a cheap one neither a luxury one. I just want to buy the medium alarm clock from usual brands you find in store but I don’t know, for a given type of product, which are the usual, reliable brands. Well, Amazon now being Aliexpress with a margin, it’s impossible. Just typing "alarm clock" in the search bar will submerge you with low quality products from temporary Chinese brands.

Yeah, amazon has basically made brands worthless on their site.

I tried searching for a cordless handheld vacuum on amazon recently. All the 5.0 reviews are AI generated unverified purchases. And then just below that, lots of RANDOMWORD generic chinese "brands".

The reputable brands you might actually buy are hidden in the noise of it all.

You're right. Remember that Netflix contest where they solicited an algorithm that would make the most accurate movie predictions? It's a quaint vestige from a time before they figured out that the "algorithm" should optimize their profit rather than your media satisfaction, because those are not the same algorithm.

> Are any major sites using this method, or at least providing a way to combine sort with a filter items with under X ratings

1. Reddit's default sorting algorithm was (and perhaps still is) based on this

2. Google's internal Q&A tool, Dory[1], used it to rank questions to ask to the leadership during the "open" mic sessions.

NOTE: please don't do the same mistake.

The math of the algorithm ensures that controversial questions never get asked, since the algorithm approximated the upvotes/downvotes ratio, not votes/views ratio.

The latter was not used because, IIRC, counting impressions on an internal site was too "technically challenging".

This, in my opinion, defies the entire point of an internal Q&A, which is to address hot topics before they spill out and become an issue.

(I don't think I'm spilling any tea talking about how Q&A in Google was run five years ago; there's no secret sauce there. It was natural to ask "which questions make it to the top", and the answer was the link to the article we're discussing. Google considered it to be fair).

[1] https://support.google.com/dory/answer/9254865?hl=en

I also noticed that after submitting this, I think HN should warn the user somehow if they're trying to submit an existing submission.

It does. But after a while, reposts are allowed through. That's on purpose, because want good articles to have multiple chances at getting attention.

The reason for posting lists of previous discussions is not to boo reposts—I hope that's clear! It's to point curious readers in the direction of additional interesting comments.

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