[Catalog-sig] Please turn off ratings
P.J. Eby
pje at telecommunity.com
Wed Apr 6 01:40:32 CEST 2011
At 12:44 AM 4/6/2011 +0200, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>Am 05.04.2011 23:51, schrieb John J Lee:
> > On Tue, 5 Apr 2011, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
> > [...]
> >> Actually, being one of the two maintainers of the software,
> >> I do get comments in private email also, or in person
> >> (but of course you can't get access to *that*)
> > [...]
> >
> > Do the users you hear from cite other software rating systems that work
> > well?
>
>It's been a while, but I think people referred to other rating systems
>in general, not to software rating.
>
> > Was the PyPI rating system modelled in any way on other rating systems?
>
>Yes, amazon.com (although it doesn't implement many of the amazon review
>system features; I think amazon has also grown new features since I
>implemented PyPI commenting).
One important feature missing is that the Amazon review system has
*always* had a back-channel for removing unhelpful reviews; in the
beginning, it was simply the ability for authors and publishers to
ask Amazon to remove them, and later, the "did you find this
helpful?" buttons were added.
Another important way that Amazon reviews differ is that they're
called *reviews*, not comments, and reviewers are rewarded in various
ways for making reviews -- they are actually scored on the number and
usefulness of their reviews, which encourages high-quality
reviews. Good Amazon reviewers typically give both the pros and cons
of a product, and describe their use case so others know whether the
review is applicable to them or not. This is socially reinforced by
example and by the rewards machinery.
In contrast, PyPI's comment system much more closely resembles
YouTube in its physical and social structure for comments... and
likewise, the comments it gets more closely resemble YouTube comments
than they do Amazon reviews.
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