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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?

+8
−2

Currently, when viewing a post, Codidact will show you the raw votes on a post, with the breakdown into upvotes and downvotes:

Screenshot of the voting buttons, showing +12 and -1.

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.

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1 comment thread

Two degrees of freedom (2 comments)
Two degrees of freedom
Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 1 year ago

A single value will never work because there are two orthogonal metrics people want to know about a post: 1 - What the consensus is on how good/bad the post is. 2 - How much the post has been rated at all.

Julius H.‭ wrote 3 months ago

Just for the sake of creativity, I feel like mentioning there are all kinds of possibilities regarding this. For example, whatever you wish to call “the number of times something has been voted on” could be taken to represent certainty - sort of like in research reproducibility, more votes is taken to sort of flatten out random variation. The certainty of the score could be represented visually by the score’s opacity - a faint light grey makes it clear they even if the score is currently 0.3 or whatever, it’s arguably barely significant since the vote like, just opened. The more votes a post has, the closer it gets to a crisp, bold, high contrast black typeface. Also: again, that metric can be relative - instead of setting hard numbers for how many votes a post should have, compare the number to the average number of votes on each post, site-wide (or any other similar statistical technique; comparative to the whole).