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Comments on Should we start displaying the score of a post instead of the raw votes?
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Should we start displaying the score of a post instead of the raw votes?
Currently, when viewing a post, Codidact will show you the raw votes on a post, with the breakdown into upvotes and downvotes:
There's been some feedback that this is a bit too much to show, especially coming from platforms like Stack Exchange where they generally just show the aggregate score of upvotes and downvotes as one number (with the option to expand the votes to see the split). We decided to show both counts automatically to better show when there's controversy.
However, we now also have another option. We have a method for scoring posts that assigns a score between 0 and 1 to each post.
Perhaps instead of showing the raw votes on each post, we should instead show the post score (e.g. 0.81363... or 0.3793...), rounded to the nearest two or three decimal places (so that it would show as 0.937 or 0.276), with the raw votes available on request, perhaps either on click or in the tools menu.
This would take people a bit of time to get used to, but it might be worth that initial adjustment time, since this... is our scoring system and we want people to be familiar with it quickly.
This has the added benefit of making it much clearer why answers are sorted the way they are by displaying their score (that's currently computed without being displayed) for everyone to see. The raw votes matter less than the computed score.
Background: the information content being presented In principle, the number of upvotes and number of downvotes on a …
5mo ago
Why show scores at all? When I was at Stack Exchange, we spent a good deal of time discussing sort orders in the cont …
5mo ago
If we show raw Wilson score I think we're going to see a lot of confusion and questions -- "is 0.65 good?" "what does it …
4y ago
I agree that on a list of questions, one clear indicator of fitness is most helpful. On a post's own page, it might make …
4y ago
All the proposals so far are missing what people really want to know, which are two orthogonal metrics: How good/bad …
4y ago
instead of - Absolutely not! Showing separate + and - votes is a good thing. Or as they say, that's not a bug, it's a …
4y ago
In my view displaying fractional numbers representing an unintuitive measure would be even worse than displaying two int …
1y ago
Post
If we show raw Wilson score I think we're going to see a lot of confusion and questions -- "is 0.65 good?" "what does it take to get to 0.8?" etc. Even if we explain that it's a value from 0 to 1 indicating some quality measure, I don't think it's all that meaningful to show that number to most people -- and certainly not as the only indication.
We should consider context. I think it's very important to show the raw votes for answers to questions. The sorting conveys relative ranking, so we don't need to show meters or scores or anything else there -- just the votes. I'm not averse to making the scores available, but they shouldn't be primary because the page already conveys this information in a more intuitive way.
Why is it important to show the raw vote counts? Because ranking, and scores were we to show them, give a sense, but if you're considering which of these answers on EE to follow to modify your phone, you really ought to know that while that answer has lots of upvotes it also has lots of downvotes. That should prompt you to look more closely. Maybe the downvoters are wrong or misunderstood, or maybe they know one missed step and you'll brick your expensive phone.
For top-level posts (questions or articles), though, our priorities might be different. Is it actually valuable to see question scores on the question list at all -- either raw scores or a meter or both? What are we trying to accomplish by showing this? If we answer that, I think we'll be in a better position to decide what to show there.
Finally, on the question page I talked about answers but not the question. Since we're showing raw votes for all the answers, I think consistency demands that we show them for the question too. And just as we're not showing graphical meters for answers (because we don't need to), I wouldn't show one for the question on the question page.
A final thought about meters on the question page: when we were kicking ideas around on wireframes, someone suggested that the meter should take other factors into account, for example that a question is closed. If the function of the meter is to highlight questions that are likely to be most fruitful for a busy skimmer, then we should take such factors into account -- at which point the meter isn't just a reflection of score. If, on the other hand, the meter is just a reflection of score, then what are we trying to accomplish by showing it? (The answer might be multi-modal communication, but I'd rather ask and find out than guess.)
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