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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 …
12mo 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 …
12mo 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
Just a thought that occurred to me: One problem when seeing the Wilson score when not knowing it is that it's not cle …
6mo ago
In my view displaying fractional numbers representing an unintuitive measure would be even worse than displaying two int …
2y ago
Post
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 more sense to also show the up- and down-vote counts.
Given that the "score," here, does not directly represent anything anyone can count, but rather is the result of plugging the up- and down-votes into a not-fully-intuitive continuous function, I think that showing the literal number that comes out of that function would be more confusing than helpful. Instead, I suggest representing it with a Likert scale, with a Help topic that provides both the formula and broad qualitative interpretations of the various scores. For example:
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↓↓ (Wilson score 0 - 20%): The community has expressed a clear consensus that this is not a helpful post.
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↓ (Wilson score 20% - 40%): There is some indication from the community that this is not a helpful post.
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↕ (Wilson score 40% - 60%): The community hasn't expressed a clear consensus regarding how helpful this post is.
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↑ (Wilson score 60% - 80%): There is some indication from the community that this is a helpful post.
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↑↑ (Wilson score 80 - 100%): The community has expressed a clear consensus that this is a helpful post.
In place of the ASCII arrow glyphs in this example, some variation of a traditional five-level signal-strength symbol could be used, such as:
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