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Re: Change the SP voting system?

PostPosted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 1:02 am
by Arthur Digbee
Anyway, as I understand it, the issue is moot. The voting system is controlled by the absentee owners, not Our Friends The Elves.

Re: Change the SP voting system?

PostPosted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 3:11 pm
by Alpinist
Buz Groshong wrote:
Bob Sihler wrote:
Buz Groshong wrote:The problem isn't the voting system; it's the voters! The scoring method would probably work quite well if everyone didn't consider anything less than a 10 to be a negative vote. It gives me a relative idea of what people think of my work and that's good enough for me.


But what makes many of us unhappy is that less than 10 lowers the score when many of us feel that something like 7 should leave the score unchanged, with 8, 9, and 10 making increases. I think many of us feel this way because it's what we got used to with grading systems in school-- 7 is a C (average), 8 a B, etc.

What makes it worse is that something less than 10 can sink a score way below what you would expect it to for that, and the effect is larger the higher your power is. For example, I just gave a test vote of 7 on a new image. The score was 50.34%. According to the guidelines, 7 is "Pretty Good," but it produces a score that would be a failing grade on a test. (I canceled the vote, by the way.)

Earlier this summer, someone pointed out a page that had three 7 votes. The score was in the 20's. I just can't think that's how the system was meant to work, or can't imagine that anyone would really expect people to like such a system if that indeed was the intent.

I agree with the idea of giving bigger contributors more weight, so I don't favor a Like option. Like some others, I'd prefer to see some tweaking with how 7, 8, and 9 are registered.


I haven't seen results that dramatic, but I do see your point. I've had at least one photo get a 7, which was probably what it deserved; the effect was to drag it down below others of mine that got all 10s that they probably didn't deserve. Despite of that sort of thing, the voting does give me a relative idea of how people see my photos - I like to see how my photos score relative to each other but try to ignore how they compare with other people's photos. The scoring really gets unfair though when it involves pages rather than photos. From what I can tell from looking at scores, the systems rewards objects for the amount of traffic they get as well as the number of votes they get and that doesn't seem right. It would seem that with everyone voting 10 that maybe the score should reflect the vote/view ratio since for some viewers not voting is basically withholding a 10 vote. I do agree with the idea that a 7 vote should not radically drag down the total score of an object.

The average weighting method that I've described would do exactly what Bob stated above. That method is not perfect, but it is 10,000 better than the current scoring algorythm and it would yield results that most people expect when they vote.

Re: Change the SP voting system?

PostPosted: Sun Nov 13, 2011 6:03 pm
by Baarb
Found this thread after searching for some of the text from the original voting guidelines (by Josh / consensus?)
http://www.summitpost.org/dropdown-help-voting/171250 Only 700 or so hits on that, quite interesting. Wonder what would happen if as you went to click on a number in the vote bar, a little box came up with the applicable 'official' meaning. Would you think to yourself 'Yes, this is in fact the best ever', or would you relent and think 'You know what, it's average at best and there are already better ones on here.' As that link states, one has to keep in mind the purpose of the photo, many are for sheer usefulness rather than aesthetics. I'm also slightly curious to know how the star system of SP1 is incorporated into SP2. There are some decent pictures out there with percentages in the single digits because of such votes.