I liked Yvain’s post and voted it up, but not because I’m a “fan”,
Cheap shot detected here. I said I was a fan in order to soften the effect of saying that the post was overrated; without that disclaimer, my statement might have been interpreted as a criticism of Yvain or his post. Nothing I said implies that I make a habit of upvoting posts just because of who their author is.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that I don’t get the point of your parenthetical.
The point was that I don’t think that that post was as as outstanding relative to other posts as its score suggests.
I’ve long settled on interpreting the meaning of upvotes as “I like this post and want to see more like this”.
What would you want us to adopt as a voting norm?
That’s fine as a voting norm. Under that norm, the proper interpretation of my remark is that my eagerness to see more posts like Yvain’s “Eight short studies on excuses” is comparable to my eagerness to see more posts like those with scores in the 30-40 range; in particular, the first quantity is not 2-3 times the second.
Yes, and for that reason it may not be correct to interpret the score of a post as the “collective eagerness” to see more posts like it, and therefore not entirely appropriate to draw the kind of comparison you’re drawing.
Unless people upvote Yvain’s articles merely because they are Yvain’s (which was what I thought you were getting at, and all I was getting at, with the term “fan”), then we want to interpret high scores as marking posts that have broad appeal, rather than posts which have intense appeal.
Not, “people liked Studies On Excuses almost as much as they liked Generalizing from One Example”, but “almost as many people liked Studies as liked Generalizing”. It makes a difference to me to think of it that way, not sure if it will to you...
If post X has a score strictly less than post Y, then it follows that there are either people who upvoted Y and did not upvote X, or people who downvoted X and did not downvote Y. If I think the score of X should be equal to the score of Y, then I am disagreeing with the voting behavior of the persons in those sets, at least one of which (as I said) is nonempty.
Cheap shot detected here. I said I was a fan in order to soften the effect of saying that the post was overrated; without that disclaimer, my statement might have been interpreted as a criticism of Yvain or his post. Nothing I said implies that I make a habit of upvoting posts just because of who their author is.
The point was that I don’t think that that post was as as outstanding relative to other posts as its score suggests.
That’s fine as a voting norm. Under that norm, the proper interpretation of my remark is that my eagerness to see more posts like Yvain’s “Eight short studies on excuses” is comparable to my eagerness to see more posts like those with scores in the 30-40 range; in particular, the first quantity is not 2-3 times the second.
Yes, and for that reason it may not be correct to interpret the score of a post as the “collective eagerness” to see more posts like it, and therefore not entirely appropriate to draw the kind of comparison you’re drawing.
Unless people upvote Yvain’s articles merely because they are Yvain’s (which was what I thought you were getting at, and all I was getting at, with the term “fan”), then we want to interpret high scores as marking posts that have broad appeal, rather than posts which have intense appeal.
Not, “people liked Studies On Excuses almost as much as they liked Generalizing from One Example”, but “almost as many people liked Studies as liked Generalizing”. It makes a difference to me to think of it that way, not sure if it will to you...
If post X has a score strictly less than post Y, then it follows that there are either people who upvoted Y and did not upvote X, or people who downvoted X and did not downvote Y. If I think the score of X should be equal to the score of Y, then I am disagreeing with the voting behavior of the persons in those sets, at least one of which (as I said) is nonempty.