scoring curiosity

12 Jul 2016

I have a couple of questions about the mechanisms of story voting and scoring.

I am a very curious person; I like to know how things work. There are a few things that are befuddling me about what I've seen on the site, which generally fall in two categories.

I - score rounding. Why is it that score averages seems to leap from 4.95 to 5 under certain situations? That is, if a story has 19 5s and 1 4, then its average score is 5 and not 4.95. It certainly makes story averages higher, but I'm curious as to why. Is it to help nullify the effect of troll voters? It's not as if scores of 4.96 through 4.99 are impossible, but it takes a much higher total number of votes for such scores to be seen. (e.g., a story with 71 5s and 4 4s will have a score of over 4.95 but under 5).

II - disappearing and reappearing votes. One of my stories I'm most happy with is Casting Amber, which is also one of my most voted-on stories. As a result, I've noticed what's happened with its scoring more than perhaps with other stories. I know it got a 3 at some point. Easy to remember also because at least one commenter wrote, "I can't believe someone gave this a three."

However, when I responded to that comment, the 3 was nowhere to be seen on the little bar graph. More recently, it's back. How does that work?

Please don't take these questions as complaining about my scores. I'm not. I'm very happy with the scores on my stories. But, I've seen enough scoring over the course of time to be curious about some of the things that I don't understand.

Any illumination would be welcome!

12 Jul 2016

Hi

I can answer your questions.

1. We use a Truncated Mean to calculate the story average score. This discards votes from the high and low ends aiming to reduce the impact a troll could have on your score.

2. In respect to your phantom 3, I'm not sure. Members are able to change their scores now at anytime. You should see the score and modifications appear in your timeline. If you were concerned there was something malicious going on, I'm happy to dig a bit deeper.

Cheers, gav

12 Jul 2016

Quote by gav
Hi

I can answer your questions.

1. We use a Truncated Mean to calculate the story average score. This discards votes from the high and low ends aiming to reduce the impact a troll could have on your score.

2. In respect to your phantom 3, I'm not sure. Members are able to change their scores now at anytime. You should see the score and modifications appear in your timeline. If you were concerned there was something malicious going on, I'm happy to dig a bit deeper.

Cheers, gav

Thank you!
#1 makes a lot more sense now. Because the majority of my votes are 5s with the occasional 4, for me this effectively means my scores are somewhat inflated, because the 4s are not malicious (at least I hope they're not). So if my scores are inflated, I get it (and am not complaining).

As for #2. It wasn't someone changing their vote because I never got that alert for this story (and I'd have had to have it twice). I assumed it was something like a member deactivating their account and then reactivating. However, I'd have assumed that the temporary loss of the 3 (which, per question #1, was what was keeping the avg score for that story from being a 5), would have bumped the score up, which it didn't. When the 3 reappeared the score stayed the same (as far as I know).

I'm not concerned at all about anything malicious. I'm also not concerned about that story not having a 5 average. I'm just curious about what's going on. I like to know how things work and that one confuses me.

Thanks again!

Ps. My subscription alert email for this thread is going to my old email address, not the one I changed it to a few weeks ago. Perhaps the address database for these alerts needs to be refreshed or repopulated in some way?