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So you let people rate it with 5 stars, but then show it as 3.7 magic points. Magic points can be your proprietary ranking system.

You don't need to let them rate with stars and also show it as stars.

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If I saw that happen, I would probably assume that the item was so popular that a bunch of other people had rated it concurrently. Unless the number of ratings were displayed simultaneously. There's a bit of a comprehension barrier in letting people know that the ordering score is not the same as the thing they're inputting, and what the relationship between them is. I don't know how to solve that problem (if I had to, I'd probably just not show the ranking numbers at all- the user already sees the sorting order, what do they need the raw numbers for?), but that's OK, 'cause I prefer to sidestep it- just don't use a graded rating scale like "5 stars". At least not unless you have a really good justification and explanation of what precisely the scale means. 5-star rating systems tend to result in large numbers of 5s and large numbers of 1s anyway, so you might as well just go with a binary like/dislike system. The fact that a ranking is a real number and your input is an "up"/"down" enumeration makes it clear that the ranking you see is not the same thing as the data that you put in. It could also be useful from a defusing confusion standpoint to make the ranking more complicated by mixing in an age factor (like HN does) or some other extra band of information. Then if a user doesn't immediately understand the relation between their rating and the final ranking, they can easily write it off as being due to some other factor that's not in their control anyway.

You can do all stars but if you say you need at least X people to rate before showing any. That's what many sites do.

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