Hacker News Reader

Comment by SECProto | Hacker News Reader

Can we have half stars or quarter stars? I read a lot of books, and choosing full-star 1 to 5 makes the ratings pretty useless for people who read a lot. My internal rankings are:

1 hated it/was offended/didn't finish

2 disliked it/likely didn't finish

3 finished but it was a struggle

4 finished/enjoyed/had some issues

5 finished fast/really enjoyed/may or may not have still had issues.

If I look back at the 30 to 50 books I read in a year, it's really difficult to get any sort of ranking out of them. I've only got two choices for books I liked (4 or 5) and two choices for books I disliked (1 or 2). Having half stars would help my ratings relative to one another.

View on HN

Your post only goes to point out how arbitrary rating systems are since everyone brings their own ideas into the system of what ratings mean.

What you really want is some personal bookkeeping which doesn't make sense for the 5-star system. You'd want tags or the private note textarea to scribble down your arbitrary personal rating system.

Frankly I think more ratings are just worse. You're pitching 10 or 20 different options instead of 5.

Yep, I could do with a simple thumbs up/down rating system as I usually only rate books either 1 star if I don't like them or 5 stars if I do like them. The multiple stars rating system is pretty pointless to me.

Why take 60% of the rating space up by negative ratings? It seems like what you really care about is degrees of goodness.

An alternative approach:

1 - I disliked it. 2 - It's OK 3 - This is good 4 - This is great 5 - This is a must-read

It's the problem with star systems, which is that we'll always have different definitions. Your 3s are living next to the other poster's 3s and mean very different things.

That said, I think the world has also suffered from ratings inflation. I tend to assume anything under a 4 means "bad" or "meh" myself.

Bigger numbers don't help much either, rating systems out of 10 tend towards anything under an 8 or maybe a 7 being average.

The best rating system I have ever seen is the "best of two" system that pixoto.com uses to rate photos.

This is exactly the way the current Goodreads rating is supposed to work (and I'm personally OK with it). But my guesstimate is that for 95% Goodreads users everything below 4 stars means that the book sucks.

How do you know that's how the rating system is "supposed" to work?

(Not parent)

If you go to rate a book on good reads and hover over each of the the 5 stars, here are the "title" attributes of the links:

* title="did not like it"

* title="it was ok"

* title="liked it"

* title="really liked it"

* title="it was amazing"

Interesting, thanks. I use the app mainly, and it doesn't have those descriptors as far as I know.

I think it's interesting to have the middle/neautral rating described (3 star, middle of the range available) as "liked it" (a positive response).

I have been rating a year or so after reading based on how much of the book I remember or how much it influenced me. It's made rating much easier.

That doesn't fundamentally change that there are only 2 choices available for books I've enjoyed.

Also, if you asked me about a book I read a year ago, I wouldn't be able to do much more than confirm I read it. That's part of why I use Goodreads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com