Simple rating of articles up and down is not really helpful to determine what
you wish to read. The only things it can possibly achieve are standing out of
articles that are liked by just about everyone, and erasure of test posts
that aren't liked by no-one.

The reason for this is obvious - we are all different. As a finnish example,
there are people here that love Calmis's posts - and there are people who
couldn't care less. Same thing for a lot of other authors. So those articles
do not get scored reasonably at all - which means that it is very hard to
have any ignore level for articles since you might wish to read some author
most people do not wish to read.

So, what could be done to fix this?

It's simple - reinstate a so called 'grouplens' system here, and use it to
rank articles (google grouplens). There, instead of globally ranking an
article up or down, the estimate given to an article is based on your and
other's earlier rankings. The system so that it tries to find other people
who rank articles in the same way you do, and use their rankings to show
the value for the article you have yet to rank. So, to say it simply -
instead of seeing what _everybody_ thinks about the article, you see how
people who like the same articles _you_ do think about the article.

So then people who like Calmis's articles will see them highly ranked if
they are good - since there's a bunch of others that feel the same way -
and people who hate them see them ranked low - since there's a bunch of
others that hate them as well.

Thank you for listening.

-- Naked

I would not totally agree to that due to a few reasons:

1) This ranking system's main goal is not the automated ignore as it might
seem, at least not in my head. This is just a way to express your opinion in a
way of rating the article down or up, instead of posting "it rocks"/"it
sucks"/"i don't give a shit" type of replies. The global article ranking is
displayed along with number of votes on the article on purpose. To show how
many people have expressed their opinion on the material posted and how the
overall rating behaved, i.e. if we have 10 votes and rank at 0 it means that
on average this article's material is treated by readers approximately equally
good as bad. I agree, that's not the definitive public questinnaire "Rate my
brain.com". But it's a way, in a way

2) Do we need a complicated rating system? In 99.999% - no. Ignoring on rating
will be an _optional_ way for people to filter out especially crappy posts,
which were definitively rated down. For the rest, see above. It's not "rating"
as such, still IMO, and, as i stated above, I'm not really sure we need a
complicated rating analysis system with that auto-filtering abilities.
(Personally I am not gonna use auto-filtering, since I am interested even in
the crappiest things said here, since it is after all an opinion.)

Just my 1.5 cents.

--
Favorit.


^o^