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Vote counts as ratios? [duplicate]
Closed as duplicate by Monica Cellio on Feb 22, 2024 at 23:44
This question has been addressed elsewhere. See: Should we start displaying the score of a post instead of the raw votes?
This question was closed; new answers can no longer be added. Users with the reopen privilege may vote to reopen this question if it has been improved or closed incorrectly.
This is not meant to be a committed advocating or request of the following, but rather a conversation to analyze the possibilities and potential benefits and drawbacks.
What if the total score for a post was bounded in a small interval - either (-1,1), or possibly (0, 1) (or even [0, 1]).
There are some different mathematical functions one could use for this.
The main point might be to change from the kind of large-scale dynamics of, “this post has 66 upvotes; this one has -1”, to a kind of bounded ratio score, “0.97” is a generally positive score, which may yet fluctuate over time; whereas a 0.1 “needs improvement”.
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This is already how it works. Those red/green bars in post lists are driven by a Wilson score for the post based on the numbers of up and downvotes. Post & answer sorting is also based on these Wilson scores. If you hover over the vote counts on any post, the Wilson score will be displayed in a tooltip.
We don't display this score, instead opting to display the vote counts, because the raw counts are more intuitively understandable — "5 people like this post and 2 people don't" is more understandable than "this post is scored 0.3333333333 out of 1" (which does not mean that 33.33% of people liked it). Regardless, a lot is based on it behind the scenes.
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