How Not to Sort by Average Rating (2009)

Post by fludlight » Thu, Jul 16, 2015, 3:42 PM UTC

stdbrouw wrote: post #15

Houshalter wrote: post #14

There is a much simpler and elegant method. Just rank posts by their probability of getting an upvote. This is just (upvotes+1)/(upvotes+downvotess+2).

This gives an advantage to new posts for which the probability is much more uncertain: it's easier to get 1 upvote and 0 downvotes (rank 2/3) than to get 1999 upvotes and 999 downvotes (also rank 2/3). Maybe that's what you want, but the post is exactly about those cases when this is not what you want.