Re: Design for storing likes/dislikes?

Hi,

I'm leaning more towards NullBooleanField at the moment.

There's a number of reasons we're going for binary voting (like/dislike), versus say a star rating. Firstly, rating systems like that are ambiguous - a 2-star rating from me may not be the same as a 2-star rating from somebody else. I believe YouTube used to have star ratings, and then Google changed them to likes/dislike. General consensus seems to be that binary-voting systems are better.

http://onpon4.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/5-star-ratings-vs-likesdislikes-why.html

http://davidcel.is/blog/2012/02/01/why-i-hate-five-star-ratings/

Cheers,

Victor

On Thursday, 18 July 2013 06:31:15 UTC+10, arnonym wrote:

On Tue, 16 Jul 2013 17:29:47 -0700 (PDT) Victor Hooi
<victo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We have a list of users, who are going to like/dislike various
> widgets.
>
> My question is regarding how to store the like/dislikes.
>
> Essentially, there can be three states between a user and a widget -
> like, dislike, and unrated, so it's not just a straight Boolean.
>
> I'm thinking of just doing a M2M between user and widgets models, and
> then storing an extra field on that M2M.
>
> I can either store a Boolean, for whether the item is liked/unliked -
> and then an unrated item simply won't be exist in the table.
>
> Or I can store a integer (with a choice tupled defined), with say
> 0=unrated, 1=like, 2 = unlike, and all possible combinations are
> listed.
>
> We'll be doing queries to compare users, and see if their
> likes/dislikes intersect.
>
> Are there any pros/cons of the two approaches for this given query,
> or is there perhaps a more efficient way of storing this data?

I would probably do this with an explicit many to many relationship.
My first thought would be to use a boolean (true for like, false for
unlike, not a row in the table for unrated). On second thought I would
replace your integer-enum idea by using the integer for a real rating
for example from -5 to 5. While at first you might just map like/unlike
to 5/-5, for the future you could do rows of stars or rows of
thumbs-up/-downs.

Have fun,

Arnold

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