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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
All the proposals so far are missing what people really want to know, which are two orthogonal metrics:
- How good/bad the crowd thinks the answer is.
- How heavily the crowd has weighed in.
The first tells you how much to believe the answer, and the second how much to believe the first point. Put another way, you want to see a score and how big the error band is for that score.
So lets show that.
The obvious formula for #1 is (up votes) / (total votes). I'd multiply that by 100 then round to the nearest integer. Values from 0-100 are easier to explain than 0.0 to 1.0. You don't really need to know the difference between 98.2 and 98.4, so keep it simple.
There are more choices how to present the confidence, but the total number of votes is a really simple value. We could get into probability, gaussian distribution assumptions, standard deviations, and the like, but too many people won't understand that and just tune out.
Examples
+5, -3: Score 63, votes 8
+20, -15: Score 57, votes 35
+0, -0: Votes 0
+0, -3: Score 0, votes 3
I would display the 0-100 score most prominently, probably without a label, then the number of votes below that in smaller font with a label.
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