I agree with the expectation that many posts/comments would be nearly indistinguishable on a five-star scale. I’m not sure there’s a way around this while keeping most of the desirable properties of having a range of options, though perhaps increasing it from 10 options (half-stars) to 14 or 18 options would help.
My basic thought is that if I can see a bunch of 4.5 star posts, I don’t really need the signal as to whether one is 4.3 stars vs 4.7 stars, even if 4.7 is much harder to achieve. I, as a reader, mostly just want a filter for bad/mediocre posts, and the high-end of the scale is just “stuff I want to read”. If I really want to measure difference, I can still see which are more uncontroversially good, and also which has more gratitude.
I’m not sure how a power-law system would work. It seems like if there’s still a fixed scale, you’re marking down a number of zeroes instead of a number of stars. …Unless you’re just suggesting linear voting (ie karma)?
One of my ideas for this (when thinking about voting systems in general) is to have a rating that is trivially inconvenient to access. Like, you have a ranking system from F to A, but then you can also hold the A button for 10 seconds, and then award an S rank, and then you can hold the S button for 30 seconds, and award a double S rank, and then hold it for a full minute, and then award a triple S rank.
The only instance I’ve seen of something like this implemented is Medium’s clap system, which allows you to give up to 50 claps, but you do have to click 50 times to actually give those claps.
If we were making just a small change to voting, then the one I would have liked to make is having something like the clap system instead of weakvotes and strongvotes, and have the cap decided by karma score (as it is now, if your strongvote is X, your cap would be X).
I agree with the expectation that many posts/comments would be nearly indistinguishable on a five-star scale. I’m not sure there’s a way around this while keeping most of the desirable properties of having a range of options, though perhaps increasing it from 10 options (half-stars) to 14 or 18 options would help.
My basic thought is that if I can see a bunch of 4.5 star posts, I don’t really need the signal as to whether one is 4.3 stars vs 4.7 stars, even if 4.7 is much harder to achieve. I, as a reader, mostly just want a filter for bad/mediocre posts, and the high-end of the scale is just “stuff I want to read”. If I really want to measure difference, I can still see which are more uncontroversially good, and also which has more gratitude.
I’m not sure how a power-law system would work. It seems like if there’s still a fixed scale, you’re marking down a number of zeroes instead of a number of stars. …Unless you’re just suggesting linear voting (ie karma)?
One of my ideas for this (when thinking about voting systems in general) is to have a rating that is trivially inconvenient to access. Like, you have a ranking system from F to A, but then you can also hold the A button for 10 seconds, and then award an S rank, and then you can hold the S button for 30 seconds, and award a double S rank, and then hold it for a full minute, and then award a triple S rank.
The only instance I’ve seen of something like this implemented is Medium’s clap system, which allows you to give up to 50 claps, but you do have to click 50 times to actually give those claps.
If we were making just a small change to voting, then the one I would have liked to make is having something like the clap system instead of weakvotes and strongvotes, and have the cap decided by karma score (as it is now, if your strongvote is X, your cap would be X).