First, thanks for all your questions, suggestions and concerns about our rating process. We believe strongly that the pair-wise rating model is the first ungameable ranking process for the ranking of user generated content. That said we have all learned that some aspects can be made even better to make it easier to use and increase the speed by which articles get ranked correctly.
Therefore, the rating process will be improved in several ways over the coming weeks. Some of these changes will come with the new Debate release and some will come in the next release.
Improving the User Experience
1. Skip Button – We have all experienced times when we are rating when we come across an article that we either know nothing about or we have no interest in the content. We will add a skip button so that you can just skip by without doing a rating. We will have methods that will still make it difficult for someone to try to cheat the system by simply skipping many articles just to get to the one article they want to rate.
2. Choosing Channels – Many of us have written articles across multiple channels. However, on a given day you only are interested in, for example, pets. This new feature will let you select which channel you would like to rate articles in.
Speed and Accuracy of Rankings
Speed and accuracy go hand in hand. The accuracy of the rankings is dependent on getting enough ratings on articles within the same title. The speed of getting those ratings performed relative to the speed of new articles being added is critical to the perception that the ratings are fair. We’ve all experienced times when it appears that an article isn’t getting rating or that a ranking seems unfair. If one title’s articles get many rating and another title’s articles get few ratings, then the first sorting will be very accurate and the second won’t. It’s not that the second is unfair; it just hasn’t gotten enough ratings to be accurate. It seems simple enough, but it gets more complicated when you consider how active a topic is. If a topic becomes very popular and many articles get added quickly then it changes the dynamics of which articles need ratings more quickly. Therefore we will be doing the following.
1. Selection of which article to rate by the system – The algorithms are being improved to ensure the best overall balance is made of which articles need rating the most.
2. There also improvements to some internal mechanisms whereby some articles weren’t getting any ratings quickly.
Many of your concerns will be addressed by these improvements. As these improvements are added, please let us know what you think.
Regards,
Andrew
VP of Marketing and Sales
Helium, Inc.
Home 
Gallery 
