Monday, November 29, 2004

   Great Post, My Response
I read a very well thought-out and carefully written article on Shapyi's myOtaku site about the things he believes we should do to improve ourselves. I have to applaud him for his efforts and I feel they definitely deserve a personal response, addressing each of the points he made in turn.

Voting System

The yes/no system wasn't actually brought about immediately; rather it came about through an evolutionary process. When I first created a fan art site many years ago, we used a scale system from 1-5. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a disaster. Our highest rated artist received a 3.8 out of 5. Extrapolated to a 10 point system, that means only a 7.6/10.

A yes/no system I feel gives better information to an artist. It's much better to say that 80% of the people who looked at someone's art liked it versus saying that someone's art, on average, received a 7.6/10. How many people voted above 7.6? How many people voted below? Did most people actually give your art a 10 and one person gave it a 2 and that's why it's so low?

Also, please remember that the purpose of ratings is two-fold. One is to give the artist feedback, and the other to allow sorting! That's why when I sort by rating in any category, I can see what tend to be the better pieces of art closer to the top.

(Also, HotOrNot uses a 10-point scoring system that's curved. Curving doesn't affect sorting but it does make artists feel better about themselves. However, on the flip-side, it sounds like a fantastic, fantastic technical headache to implement, especially since we already have hundreds of thousands of ratings in our database.)

Also, forcing people to type reasons why they want to vote 'no' would dissuade people from ever voting no, potentially leading to an artificially high and meaningless score.

Anyways I'll think about it. Just realize though doing anything like this would mean resetting our entire database.

Hall of Fame

Yeah, maybe. But it lets new visitors get to our highest rated artists in only 1-click.

Administration

I realize this. We've been working on it for a long time.

Anime Reviews

There are standards--maybe not in the ratings, but in the actual text of the review and in the viewer comments. We only approve like 10% of our review submissions. Between those three, you have a good idea of what to expect from the anime. (I'd hope no one bases their anime purchasing decisions on a rating score on any site.)
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