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Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

Mike, great job on this. Very informative. I have 2 questions for you:

1. is your slider from the jQuery UI or other js framework?

2. in regards to combating the 4.3 dilemma, have you found the average ratings on steepster to be lower? maybe its too early to tell, but I'd love to see some sort of curve on your ratings distribution in a future post ...

thanks

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Thanks, callmeed.

1. Yep, slider implementation is jQuery UI.

2. It is too early to tell, but we're definitely planning to share a follow up. As mentioned in the post, we had a simple thumbs up/down for ratings and were seeing a greater than 90% positive average, so we were definitely experiencing that bias. Just today, albeit with a much too small sample size, we're starting to see a more diverse mix of averages. We still expect to have that positive skew but because we're now operating with a 100 point scale in the UI, we hope the granularity will help users distinguish subtler differences in rating.

It'd also be interesting to know if the number of ratings decrease or increase. I wonder if your users will find the added granularity a nuisance or an incentive.

It will be interesting. It's important to note the nature of our community and whom we expect to contribute. Generally, we're geared toward a more passionate user who we find to be more than willing to contribute at this level of granularity. So we've made the choice to cater toward their needs while still trying to remain accessible.

But, this is a good point, and I think an important one to consider when evaluating the mechanic that works best for your community/site.

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