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Ask HN: How to convert 5 star ratings to up/down voting?

1 points by rradu ↗ HN
I've got a site with close to a million ratings on thousands pieces of content. I'm redoing the site and I want to scrap the 5-star rating system and go for a like/dislike thing--sort of like what YouTube did.

The system will display how many votes there have been and the score (up votes minus down votes).

I want to keep all those ratings from the current setup, and still be at least a bit accurate with the scores (aka content that had higher star rating to have an appropriately higher score--of course this also depends on the number of votes which is why I don't exactly know how to go about it)

Suggestions?

4 comments

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pook
http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/09/paper/download/22... may help. The polarization into "strongly like" and "strongly dislike" ought to help.
rradu
Yea it does help.

I can say the star rating is just an average of up and down. So if there were 10 votes and the rating was 3 out of 5, I can assume that means there were 6 up votes and 4 down votes for a score of 2.

This sounds promising.

drKarl
Do you store each individual rating by each user or only the aggregate? If you store each individual rating you could go two ways: A) - If a rating is 3 stars or more, count as an up vote. - If a rating is 2 stars or less, count as a down vote.

B) Multiply the number of ratings for a given content by the .2xnumber of stars aggregated for that content.

rradu
Unfortunately I only store the total score and the number of votes