Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Comments on Should we start displaying the score of a post instead of the raw votes?

Parent

Should we start displaying the score of a post instead of the raw votes?

+10
−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.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

Two degrees of freedom (2 comments)
Post
+4
−4

instead of - Absolutely not!

Showing separate + and - votes is a good thing. Or as they say, that's not a bug, it's a feature.

If you want to show the score (whether integer net score or Wilson # or whatever) in addition to the + and - values, that's fine with me. But the + and - values are themselves very useful, and anyone who wants a simple net score can easily figure that out.

To answer the "redundant" part, how about always showing the non-zero parts. Examples:

  • +2, -1 - show both (as now)
  • +2, -0 - show: +2 (-0 is implied)
  • +0, -1 - show: -1 (+0 is implied)
  • +0, -0 - show either: 0 (unsigned, single value) or some "No votes yet" indication.

That cuts down on the clutter for the (hopefully common) situation where a post is all + or all -, while keeping things 100% clear when there is a mixture.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

2 comment threads

"A simple net score" (1 comment)
General comments (1 comment)
"A simple net score"
Karl Knechtel‭ wrote 12 months ago

Once the numbers get larger, mental arithmetic is not so easy. Of course, one can get a rough idea at a glance. However, I think that the "net score" is not actually that useful, and that it's a trap for people to try to compute it - a trap that is baited by putting the + and - symbols in the UI. Once the quality (as measured by Wilson score) of a post is established, the remaining orthogonal quantity, in my view, is not net vote score, but instead the total number of votes. I wrote a new answer to justify this, and give a new proposal that synthesizes some ideas from other answers.