SummitPost.org

Sarah Simon wrote:

Bubba Suess wrote:This is totally nit-picking, but ought canyons at least be equivalent to Mountains and Areas? Keep the physical features at the same level. Pages like this, which has lots of climbing beta should be worth as much as a mountain.

Bubba, while I agree that the canyon pages add value to this site, I also believe that canyons are ancillary to the purpose of this site - SummitPost. If we keep physical features at the same contribution level, does that mean we start adding Rivers and thus develop a PaddlePost element to the site? It's important that we maintain focus.

That cat is already out of the bag. Canyons were added with SPv2 and are part of the fold. All I am advocating is that physical features all be treated the same. There are canyons posted on here that have as much climbing beta as a mountain page i.e. here and here. There are also places like this that were added to SP early on and given the same treatment as mountains. Again, all I am advocating is parity between physical features.

Sarah Simon wrote:As for points for photos and albums... I'm ok with granting some points for photos and albums, but the points awarded should be miniscule compared to more substantive contributions (Areas/Ranges, Mountains/Rocks, Routes, etc.)

As for Routes...if anything's under-appreciated on this site, it's our routes. They are the utility workhorses of this community.

This I agree with completely.

Bob Sihler wrote:

Scott wrote:

The image points seem far too high at the high score end. Seems like the intention back on SPv2 was to have about a 100:1 ratio between a mountain/route/area pages to image pages.

Just my opinion, but make images votable, but not worth any points or whatever. It may help solve the debates about dumping images/etc. that seem to plague SP with predictable frequency. It really doesn't take any real effort to add a photo anyway.

I think that's a good idea. Honestly, I'd rather see no voting on pictures at all, which would put a quick end to the dumping and the manipulation games. Imagine if people focused their attention on the actual pages the pictures enhance! But I know very few will agree with me on that.

Scott's idea of voting on images but without impact to points is worth considering. To me, a little bit better would be to have a threshold for pictures to add power points--in the current system, something akin to a score of 90 or 91. This is hard to game (you can't get to 90+ without votes from a ton of people, including "non-image" people), but would give a little standing to people whose main or only contribution to the site is with truly fine visual material, such as SP images http://www.summitpost.org/user-profile-image/188423/c-172148 or http://www.summitpost.org/some-teams-ascending-some/126987/c-240230.

Bob, as for your idea: You once mentioned how you appreciated SP as the premier mountain photography site on the web (which it may be, in a quirky way), but lately you've been on this grumpy tear against images. I think you should be cautious about making too radical of a change here and inadvertently doing real damage. Images, just by themselves, have added some daily life to the site. If you don't want to participate in that life and instead like watching paint dry on the half dozen mountain pages that might be under construction at any given time, or if you prefer page 50 of the gun control thread in the forums, you can just ignore the images. But the audience for those other activities is pretty small. And one thing image voting does for you elves is encourage a decent selection for rotation to the front page, and save you the trouble of having to search through a bunch of dross manually to find the better stuff.

chugach mtn boy wrote:Scott's idea of voting on images but without impact to points is worth considering. To me, a little bit better would be to have a threshold for pictures to add power points--in the current system, something akin to a score of 90 or 91. This is hard to game (you can't get to 90+ without votes from a ton of people, including "non-image" people), but would give a little standing to people whose main or only contribution to the site is with truly fine visual material, such as SP images http://www.summitpost.org/user-profile-image/188423/c-172148 or http://www.summitpost.org/some-teams-ascending-some/126987/c-240230.

As long as points are going to be accrued from images, this unfairly dings the unsexy images that show some specific point on a route or are posted for illustrative purposes rather than because they are attractive or technically proficient images.

Bubba Suess wrote:

chugach mtn boy wrote:Scott's idea of voting on images but without impact to points is worth considering. To me, a little bit better would be to have a threshold for pictures to add power points--in the current system, something akin to a score of 90 or 91. This is hard to game (you can't get to 90+ without votes from a ton of people, including "non-image" people), but would give a little standing to people whose main or only contribution to the site is with truly fine visual material, such as SP images http://www.summitpost.org/user-profile-image/188423/c-172148 or http://www.summitpost.org/some-teams-ascending-some/126987/c-240230.

As long as points are going to be accrued from images, this unfairly dings the unsexy images that show some specific point on a route or are posted for illustrative purposes rather than because they are attractive or technically proficient images.

It doesn't ding them, it just doesn't give them separate points. You get the points by putting them on your route or mountain page. Right now, those illustrative images get way less points than the top-ranked images, but no one says they are getting "dinged." What this change would do, though, is eliminate a bit of the incentive to load large numbers of mediocre scenics, unconnected to a mountain page.

chugach mtn boy wrote:Bob, as for your idea: You once mentioned how you appreciated SP as the premier mountain photography site on the web

I did? I honestly can't imagine myself saying that unless it was in my early days on SP, but if I am corrected, I'll own it.

Or else I was being sarcastic or there is much more context to the statement.

chugach mtn boy wrote:And one thing image voting does for you elves is encourage a decent selection for rotation to the front page, and save you the trouble of having to search through a bunch of dross manually to find the better stuff.

Actually, I have proposed an idea of featured images in which one scenic shot, one climbing shot, and one beta/diagram shot would be featured.

Here is my proposal… I hope folks find it at least a very good starting point.

Feedback that would be valuable is whether folks agree on things like the relative weight of things and the rate that values increase as scores increase. I tried to minimize controversy and not make radical changes to things that were not broken (thus photos and albums still are worth something). I really think this is the way to go. But note the details... I tried to address concerns.

The old system needs changing. As the two graphs that show current point values demonstrate, over the current range of page scores there isn’t a ton of reward for quality over the typical page score range. The new voting system will result in a wide range of page scores, which makes the old point system even worse (it was exponential).

Features

1. There is now a greater emphasis on quality when coupling the proposed power point calculation with the new voting system. A page with a 91% score (thirty 10/10s or 39 9/10s) is now worth double what a weak page with one vote is worth, and 40% more than a page with one third the votes

2. I have increased the value of routes and canyons to 80% of a mountain/rock to encourage these contributions (hopefully this shows some lack of bias as I worked through this, as I don’t have many of these pages). Previously these were worth 60%.

3. Articles are worth 20% more than a mountain page. I would really like to encourage more of these contributions, and they are a ton of work. They have the potential to make the home page and site content much more interesting. This is double their previous relative worth.

4. The best albums are worth up to 1 point, same as before. But less popular albums are worth less, only one third of a point though it only takes about ten 10/10 votes to bring it to half a point. Less popular albums are going down in value.

5. Images… this is a 15th power function. Images with a score of 82 are worth 0.05 points (about the same as one with one vote today). Images with fewer votes are worthless (one tenth as much if getting only one vote). With more votes the value can approach one (same as today). 28 10/10s makes it about 0.2 points (keep in mind all votes shouldn’t be 10/10 anymore). It takes about 47 10/10s to reach 0.5 points (today that image is worth about 0.9 points). Content is being rewarded due to the extra effort required, but folks shouldn’t be discouraged from submitting appealing photos! Is this the appropriate value?

6. Custom objects are worth less, 40% of a mountain page instead of 60% before.

7. Trip reports and other objects remain at 60% of a mountain page, but like everything else things have changed so that quality is more rewarded.

Proposed point values versus page score:



Current point values versus typical page scores:
As you can see, there was previously not much reward for quality...



Current point values versus future page scores:
If we don't change the system, the exponential function at the very high end rewards only those with high profile pages.

Bob Sihler wrote:

chugach mtn boy wrote:Bob, as for your idea: You once mentioned how you appreciated SP as the premier mountain photography site on the web

I did? I honestly can't imagine myself saying that unless it was in my early days on SP, but if I am corrected, I'll own it.

Or else I was being sarcastic or there is much more context to the statement.

Actually, in a sense I guess I do think that. Where else can you find as much good photography about so many mountains?

But that is not my issue. My issues are with the types of pictures that get featured and the voting habits associated with the system and the cliques, and I firmly believe (and have some amount of evidence for) that they have degraded the site and caused some good members to leave or lose much interest.

mrchad9 wrote:Here is my proposal…

I think this is pretty reasonable. I like the engineering the point distribution to encourage certain types of submissions.

On a separate but related note. Will scores drop on their own over time like they do now or will they remain static, changed only by voting and adjustments in people's power points?

Bubba Suess wrote:On a separate but related note. Will scores drop on their own over time like they do now or will they remain static, changed only by voting and adjustments in people's power points?

The formula we are going with does not make that very easy to do.

My thoughts: Pages should not decrease over time anymore... a good page is a good page. This is probably the default, as that is how the formulas are designed.

What would be easy to do, should Matt chose to add it, would be to make the vote weighting for a particular vote be affected by when it was cast relative to other votes on the same page. I designed my formulas to use the overall weighted vote score after those adjustments are included specifically so Matt could make these kinds of adjustments for time (and member power, etc...) should he decide to do so without him having to adjust the page score formulas themselves. That is why my formula includes components for weighted vote score and total number of votes as seperate items.

As for myself, doesn't really matter to me if this sort of adjustment is included or not.

Bob Sihler wrote:My issues are with the types of pictures that get featured and the voting habits associated with the system and the cliques, and I firmly believe (and have some amount of evidence for) that they have degraded the site and caused some good members to leave or lose much interest.

That is a fuction of the POTD mechanism. You can't blame people for working within the system they are given. Easy to fix... change the system!

mrchad9 wrote:

Bob Sihler wrote:My issues are with the types of pictures that get featured and the voting habits associated with the system and the cliques, and I firmly believe (and have some amount of evidence for) that they have degraded the site and caused some good members to leave or lose much interest.

That is a fuction of the POTD mechanism. You can't blame people for working within the system they are given. Easy to fix... change the system!

Exactly!

Matt-

You may have overlooked my post on the previous page. Here is a proposal, and some reasoning behind it. I have created some additional tiers, rather than lumping everything into 'other objects'

Here are the equations I ended up with after seeing some of the feedback over the last day. Looking forward to more.

And correct... I am assuming 'page score' is a percentage

Mountains/Areas = (page score)^3 * 8
Routes/Canyons = (page score)^3 * 6.4
Articles = (page score)^3 * 9.6
Albums = (page score)^3 * 1
Images = (page score)^15 * 1
Custom Objects = (page score)^3 * 3.2

mrchad9 wrote:Here is my proposal… I hope folks find it at least a very good starting point.

Feedback that would be valuable is whether folks agree on things like the relative weight of things and the rate that values increase as scores increase. I tried to minimize controversy and not make radical changes to things that were not broken (thus photos and albums still are worth something). I really think this is the way to go. But note the details... I tried to address concerns.

The old system needs changing. As the two graphs that show current point values demonstrate, over the current range of page scores there isn’t a ton of reward for quality over the typical page score range. The new voting system will result in a wide range of page scores, which makes the old point system even worse (it was exponential).

Features

1. There is now a greater emphasis on quality when coupling the proposed power point calculation with the new voting system. A page with a 91% score (thirty 10/10s or 39 9/10s) is now worth double what a weak page with one vote is worth, and 40% more than a page with one third the votes

2. I have increased the value of routes and canyons to 80% of a mountain/rock to encourage these contributions (hopefully this shows some lack of bias as I worked through this, as I don’t have many of these pages). Previously these were worth 60%.

3. Articles are worth 20% more than a mountain page. I would really like to encourage more of these contributions, and they are a ton of work. They have the potential to make the home page and site content much more interesting. This is double their previous relative worth.

4. The best albums are worth up to 1 point, same as before. But less popular albums are worth less, only one third of a point though it only takes about ten 10/10 votes to bring it to half a point. Less popular albums are going down in value.

5. Images… this is a 15th power function. Images with a score of 82 are worth 0.05 points (about the same as one with one vote today). Images with fewer votes are worthless (one tenth as much if getting only one vote). With more votes the value can approach one (same as today). 28 10/10s makes it about 0.2 points (keep in mind all votes shouldn’t be 10/10 anymore). It takes about 47 10/10s to reach 0.5 points (today that image is worth about 0.9 points). Content is being rewarded due to the extra effort required, but folks shouldn’t be discouraged from submitting appealing photos! Is this the appropriate value?

6. Custom objects are worth less, 40% of a mountain page instead of 60% before.

7. Trip reports and other objects remain at 60% of a mountain page, but like everything else things have changed so that quality is more rewarded.

Proposed point values versus page score:

proposed page values

proposed.jpg (121.73 KiB) Viewed 1525 times

mrchad9 wrote:My thoughts: Pages should not decrease over time anymore... a good page is a good page.

I agree. I was hoping that the decrease would not be the case. I am glad it will not be.

Bob Sihler wrote:

chugach mtn boy wrote:Bob, as for your idea: You once mentioned how you appreciated SP as the premier mountain photography site on the web

I did? I honestly can't imagine myself saying that unless it was in my early days on SP, but if I am corrected, I'll own it.

Or else I was being sarcastic or there is much more context to the statement.

It's very easy to sound sarcastic on the Internet.

This is why I get so "misunderstood" on SP's forums. But ... I do detect an intense DIVISION between photographers and hard-core climbers on this site ..

In my opinion, that's not going to go away anytime soon .... but an adequate CHANGE in the voting system will be a BLESSING