Oddbean

I think it's funny that you think the bad thing is not the 5⭐ system, it's Amazon's attempt to protect small business owners from malicious and idiotic raters. Anything strictly numeric, with little or no cost, will be gamed.

*sighs* There's a lot to unpack in that one statement, as usual. 1. IDGAF about businesses, in general. The app/system I want is not a business. I want to be able to rate and share book recommendations with fellow nostriches. 2. I can parse BS reviews from others. I know that's not a universal quality. I am ignorant of how things can be "gamed" since I don't think about things like that and am more honest than most. 3. I suppose my view of this is rather myopic since I don't expect this to be used by very many people for a very significant period of time. I'm overall very skeptical of nostr super-adoption, so... I can deal with a preferably simpler system at the beginning that is coded to be flexible enough to add in enough Pow to prevent gaming later. Start simple, but start!

1. Authors are creators and therefore producers. That's a business, even if they aren't expecting monetary profit. It's negligent to put something so destructive into place, without even thinking through the consequences. 2. Has nothing to do with honesty and everything to do with decades of experience in data analytics and UX. It would take someone 1 hour to create a script that just spits out fake ratings from random npubs. 3. Once you get everyone used to the 5 ⭐ system, you can't roll it back in your app. 4. The ratings are only useful, if there are a lot of ratings. The thinner the volume of the ratings, the easier they are to game. That's why a lot of websites actually hide ratings until they have at least n number of high-quality ratings on the item.

I will have to bow to your decades of experience in this field. I couldn't care less about most of what you mention, too be honest. As an aspiring author, and one with strong opinions and also the tendency to put very unpopular ideas into my writing, I expect that my books won't be popular with certain (woke) subsets of readers, and could expect bad reviews from many people. I just don't care. I suppose it is still wise to take prudent steps to mitigate scripting attacks. One stupidly easy way is to have a simple "freemium" model where you can use the entire app for free, but if you wish to push your reviews to others/in public, you would need to pay a significant but not egregious amount of sats in order "go public." This would also help fund development while simultaneously preventing tons of new bots from ransacking the system like the Goths in Rome. If someone wanted to spend that much to leave bad reviews, cool. It's funding the app. I would still consider that a win for the overall system. Thoughts?

I thought of the same thing, or even something simpler, like zap-to-rate, so that you have to pay the author, in order to post a rating. Then only someone highly-motivated would bother. Freemium would have the advantage that malicious raters could get their contract cut and their ratings removed, so that would pressure them to be behave and stay constructive. But I don't know. I understand that some users like giving the ratings, but others find the pressure to rate really irritating and refuse to do so (which reduces the signal of each rating, as it's a self-selected subgroup giving the ratings), and I question whether other users benefit from the ratings on-net. They seem to mostly be a way to press the advantage of big players (number of ratings leads to higher average ratings, in addition to their natural advantage of simply having lots of reviews and customers/users/bookmarkers), and reduce the visibility of newcomers, as everyone sorts the results by stars. I'm not saying that I'm 💯 against it, but I'd be very cautious in implementing it and I'd be aware that the implementation burns all data bridges. You put it in there, you have to leave it in there forever. No take-backs.

I can't stand Micro-transactions. One and done for me, thank you very much. You did bring up an interesting twist, though... If somehow an author of a book is verified (my goodness, that hurts me brain thinking about), them getting a cut of review sats makes sense. So now I'm conflicted. 😅 Thank you.

Well, I mean... would you mind people giving you bad ratings, if they had to pay you for the privilege of doing it? Authors could even determine their own price, right? Half a Bitcoin for a 1⭐ and you can put whatever crap in the comment and we're good. 😅 Two comments and I retire. https://c.tenor.com/_rafdjAM5zIAAAAC/tenor.gif

That's, again, a lot deeper than I was thinking. But, that could also be a bad thing. I don't think that it should be possible to set a minimum price per star rating. It would be better to have one price to rate at any star. If that's the system to go with.

I get that the incentives are skewed. but they are pretty effective at attracting and retaining large number of users. to achieve this they do heavily surveillance on user activity, many iterations of a+b testing tweaks to their UI to create UX. If we can learn lessons from them, so long as we critically evaluate knowing they are prioritise attention and retention above satisfaction and well being.

What do you mean by that stuff? I'm a big privacy advocate and hate the heavily surveillance of user activity which is used to dominate and control us. but we can use their learning to improve user retention and provide better experiences.

IDGAF about "user retention." A better experience is just a very simple, clean, easy to understand UX that just works. I know how that should function at the user. The bank end stuff is what I don't know Jack about. A clean, simple, straightforward user interface will do the most to "keep users coming back." You only need to stick to: -automagic book lookup by title, author, barcode, or ISBN -automagic cover lookup for said titles, as an option. I know some don't care for the clutter of book covers in a clean list view. -three lists: reading, to read, read -ratings upon completion -it's not hard, I guess, to also allow written reviews but I don't think that's necessary for a first iteration -nostr connectability to the whole ecosystem, but specifically to be able to share links to books, reviews of books, and curate a separate list of connected npubs to "follow" and possibly another list of npubs to "push notifications to" when I book is finished/reviewed/added to the list "to read" list -further iterations might include a user curated and "recommended list" that others can easily add to their "to read" list, in part or total But at this point I really should be doing my fiat mining job instead of building out all the app features. My point is that I really don't care about concerns of retention. That's not at all a metric that matters to me, as a user.

How would you figure that out without being intrusive? (That's mostly a rhetorical question to get me to think about how I would do it.) I'd rather use sats as an indicator. If people will pay for it, it's valuable. See my reply to one of Stella's notes.