Rating categories are pre-set adjectives (smart, popular, funny) users can use to express a positive or negative feeling they have towards a piece of content. And the 1-5 scale allows users to express how strong their feeling is.
For example, if you love a CNN article, you can rate it 5/5 in the "like" category, but if you think it's stupid, you can rate it 2/5 in the "smart" category. 
Users only receive rewards when other people rate in the same category as them, and share a similar sentiment (positive if positive, negative if negative). If you think something is smart, you only get rewarded if others do too, not if they think it’s funny.
Here is a running list of categories:
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| like | how much people like something or how popular it is. |
| smart | how much people believe something is smart. General intelligence. |
| funny | how much people believe something is funny. |
| chill | easy-going about attendance, lateness, etc. |
| useful | has important knowledge for your field/career |
| knowledgeable | for professors, how much they know about the relevant course. |
| engaging | captures your attention, makes concepts easy to understand |
| easy | can do well without extra effort; generous grading, minimal time |
| interesting | compelling subject matter, makes you think |
| affordable | for locations, how much it costs to spend time there. |
| beautiful | for locations (Google Maps), how pretty a place is. |
When giving opinions on the internet, it’s important that we don’t loop everything into one category — like popularity, or intelligence. This is because it is a poor representation of that person's or content's social value within a specific field. Marylin Monroe was more popular than Einstein, that we can guarantee. But Albert was surely smarter - and Charlie Chaplin was funnier than both! A chef’s opinion on food should be more highly valued than an architect’s. But, when it comes to judging buildings, the chef has no clue. So, it’s important to distribute influence evenly, and weight opinions separately.
Over time, we expect to add more and more categories, allowing people to express their opinion more accurately and earn influence in specific fields of expertise. If you have a category you'd like added, reach out and let us know!
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