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Comment by sdwr | Hacker News Reader

Not having faith in the user is a giant step towards mediocrity. Does a weighted average provide better results? Then use a weighted average! The world isn't split into an elite group of power users and the unwashed masses. There are just people with enough time and attention to fiddle with browser extensions, and everyone else. And all of them want the best result to show up first.

Yelp didn't get dinged because their algorithms were hidden. They lost credibility because they were extorting businesses. Intention matters.

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I don't think this is an easy problem to solve.

The inherent problem to me seems like we're trying to condense reviews into a tiny signal of an integer in the range of 1 to 5.

For many things, this simply doesn't cut it.

2 stars, what does that mean? Was the coffee table not the advertised shade of grey? Does the graphics card overheat on medium load because of a poor cooler design? Was the delivery late (not related to the product, but many people leave these kinds of reviews)? Did you leave a 2 star review because you don't like the price but you didn't actually order the product?

All these things I've seen on reviews and I've learned to ignore star ratings because not only they can be gamed, they are essentially useless.

Props to users who take the time to write out detailed reviews of products which give you an idea of what to expect without having to guess what a star rating means, although sometimes these can be gamed as well as many sellers on Amazon and such will just give out free products in exchange for favourable reviews.

Being a consumer is not easy these days, you have to be knowledgeable in what you're buying and assume every seller is an adversary.

My goto method for reading reviews is sort by negative and only look at detailed reviews, or at least ones that explain what they thought was lacking. Often the 1/2 star reviews have fair points but might be for a use case I don't care about or similar. This generally gives me an idea of the actual pros and cons of the product as opposed to just a vague rating.

That's assuming you can trust the reviews themself of course.

The problem with having faith in your users is you have to actually do it. If you're sorting by Wilson score when the user clicks a column that displays a ranking out of five, then you're mixing two scores together in a frustrating way because you think your users are too dumb to understand.

There has to be a way to let users choose between "sort by rating, but put items without many reviews lower" and "sort by rating, even items with only one or two reviews" in a way that helps give control back to them.

The way I've seen it done is a single column with avg stars + # reviews, which isn't clickable, because why would you want to sort by minimum ranking?

> why would you want to sort by minimum ranking?

To read reviews of awful products for entertainment, I guess?

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