Quote:Original post by ukdeveloper
The fundamental problem with the rating system is that there are those who defend it to the end despite its flaws.

What flaws? It's an aggregate system. In fact, it's an aggregate of arbitrary responses. It's not a measure of your technical accuracy, or your skill as a developer. It is a measure of how the community feels about you.

Quote:I think it should be hosed and replaced with something far more robust...

Like what? I've never heard a sensible alternative suggestion.

Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
What flaws? It's an aggregate system. In fact, it's an aggregate of arbitrary responses. It's not a measure of your technical accuracy, or your skill as a developer. It is a measure of how the community feels about you.

To be fair, it wasn't always. Early in the system's history, quite a few people got mass-rated for the hell of it. "Hey, guys! Quit rating me down or I'll get sooo aaaaaangry!" "Oh oh look what I did I rated you down anyway!" was the basic model. Nowadays, though, everyone seems to find threads about ratings to be ambiently annoying as opposed to a call to arms, with a correspondingly mild response.

Quote:Original post by Sneftel

Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
What flaws? It's an aggregate system. In fact, it's an aggregate of arbitrary responses. It's not a measure of your technical accuracy, or your skill as a developer. It is a measure of how the community feels about you.

To be fair, it wasn't always. Early in the system's history, quite a few people got mass-rated for the hell of it. "Hey, guys! Quit rating me down or I'll get sooo aaaaaangry!" "Oh oh look what I did I rated you down anyway!" was the basic model. Nowadays, though, everyone seems to find threads about ratings to be ambiently annoying as opposed to a call to arms, with a correspondingly mild response.

I fail to see the contradiction. The only "flaw" in the system is that it does not reflect an instantaneous measure of community feeling toward you - if a person's attitude toward you changes but he/she does not re-rate you, well, tough. So the rating system is an aggregation of community member attitudes toward you at arbitrary times. Overall, despite two degrees of randomness, ratings converge toward an accurate value.

They're about as accurate - and useful - as pre-election polls.

My personal experience on that topic (in short, here on gamedev, it's better to follow the mainstream if you find your rating important):

Today, I received many bad ratings, and I guess it is because I called stimarco a troll (dude, I bet you're a okay man in general, but that LISP-comment...) after he said basically that the inventor of LISP was an idiot [sic] and didn't go to school before producing "crap", disregarding the fact that LISP is the 2nd oldest surviving language (1950s), hence pioneer work, and that there wasn't much school at all where they teached compiler construction, so in that case stimarcos post was unqualified.

Now, the man McCarthy eventually did not rate stimarco bad, and everyone seemed fine with stimarco calling him an idiot. So I went into that discussion and said that was "unqualified trolling", because that comment *was* unqualified, and usually unqualifiedness commentary *is* trolling. I added some more information about "Human-Readability". But then, all I received was bad votes, and my bet on that is that in general, only those people that follow the mainstream (Windows, Microsoft, C#, XNA, and stuff) have a chance of getting rated good in a bigger discussion.

I mean, just emphasizing the difference between Freeware and ..., meh (I shouldn't even think of saying the next, it would get me bad votes), recently brought me about -70 points.

What I learn:
* never ever say something that doesn't conform to the opinion of a 1500+
* never ever say one of the "badwords" (GPL, Free Software, GNU, Linux, Stallman, C++, LISP, Ray Tracing)
* go with the majority of people, or keep off bigger discussions where the majority rips you off
* don't even think of using irony like "write down XYZ 100 times ;)", people get pissed off by that when you're in the minority (contrary, they get happy when you've just ripped off someone of the minority with such a comment)

Yes, lots of complaining, but this is what I have experienced on gamedev. I have also seen the other site: When I started on gamedev some years ago, when I was doing terrain rendering in MSVCPP with DX8, everything was fine, ppl were friendly to me in general, I could participate in big and very public discussion, and they didn't ask questions like "why do publish your code under the gpl? man, that means i cannot cannibalize that code, you're so lame" (??!).

Well, same behaviour wrt my friendlyness to others, but switching from mainstream to non-mainstream brought me mostly bad votes.


(And I bet my rating will even get lower after my next statement (is 731 at the moment):)

Now I am really on the evil hippie side: GNU/Linux user, gcc user, C++ in times of C# user, Ray Tracing not Rasterizing (oh my god). Free Software.


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