Do away with "ratings"

I suggest taking away the current rating system and replacing it with something that is designed to more accurately describe someone, without all the social disasters that ratings create.

This is a hybrid of the Slashdot and Orkut systems for moderation and social networking.

Which best describes this person?
o Unspecified (default)
o Socializer
o Builder
o Scripter
o Explorer
o Achiever
o Artist
o Gamer
o Trouble

Your relationship with this person:
o Haven't met (default)
o Foe
o Neutral
o Acquaintence
o Friend
o Good Friend
o Best Friend

Setting these is anonymous. The person is not informed when there is a change.

The counts acquired for each setting are shown in the person's profile. Ie:

The community recognizes me as:
23% Socializer
11% Builder
47% Scripter
09% Explorer
04% Achiever
05% Artist
01% Gamer
00% Trouble

Other people consider me:
1 a foe
291 a friend

I consider others:
2 foes
321 friends

Acquaintence/Neutral are not counted or shown, and the various friends categories all add up to the friends total (they are distinct for your own reference and for social networking purposes that could be implemented later)

Advantages:
- You aren't *rating* someone, you're just choosing what you think defines them best, and your relationship with that person (big social difference between literally rating them).
- No more "triple neg" effect
- Anonymous ratings mean no retaliation ratings
- Gives others a fairly objective overview of your talents (no more giving false build ratings)
- Incorporates more talents than just "build".
- Rate mining becomes more or less useless

Possibilities:
- The "describes" category may be expanded, and perhaps give the user the chance to choose two categories instead of just one.
- The social network could later be expanded upon to be used for actual features (ie permissions)

I like. ESPECIALLY the anonymous ratings.

Though I'd also like the rating system to go away altogether.

I should probably also propose a way to distribute bonuses in this system.

Basically, bonuses should not be in any way tied to this system. Whatever system bonuses are tied to will be gamed to some degree or another.

So, I propose an entirely new system for bonuses.

Remeber the voting boxes?

Put something like that into each person's profile. Charge L$1 to give the person a vote. Each day or week (up for debate), the SL system will reset your ability to give the person another vote.

At the end of the week, give out bonuses according to who has the most votes.

I like most of the system you came up with Kex, but I'm not sure I'd like to go so far away from the current bonus situation. While ratings might not really represent a lot about people, what they do show (roughly) is how many people that person has met, how much they interact. Because bonuses come from this there is a built in incentive to get out and interact with people - to take the time to welcome new people, to stop when you see green dots and chat and meet new people. I think it's really important to keep the incentive to do that since SL is a much better place the more social it is.

Most of the suggested replacements for ratings would lead, I believe, to farming.

Would it be possible to create a personal version of dwell? The more time you spend with other people the higher your personal dwell.

Define "with".

This is an AWESOME idea!

It gives nerds like me enough numbers to doodle with (how "popular" is this person? what does this person do?) and keeps everything private.

Lindens, please listen to that he has to say

1.4! 1.4!

LF

Prolly catfish farming.

However, this punishes those who do good work but are not social people. Why only reward the popular and socialable people? Putting all the importantce on social behavior while ignoring creative and entertaining builds by nonsocial people seems like a flawed system. That reminds me of high school.

Meanwhile, the current ratings system is about the least socially-adapted system we could use. People are neg-rating others for things they say on the forums. People are afraid to neg-rate people who are misbehaving in-world because they fear the retaliatory triple-negs. And people keep giving out build ratings to others who have never even touched the build tools.

Finally, you can still estimate how many people a person has interacted with by looking at their "friends" and "foes" numbers. But at least it will not have a bearing on their bonus.

I think the bonus should be a lot more dynamic. Making it so that you have to constantly earn your bonus every week will encourage people to keep doing things that impress other people.

I once read a post where someone said they came across a build someone made and were very impressed by it. They went to rate the person, but found they already had done so.

The current rating system doesn't let you keep rewarding the people who keep being innovative. Even newbies have to work long and hard before they will have have the chance at a high bonus.

With a weekly vote-based bonus system, a newbie could join SL and a week later recieve the top bonus for building something genuinely amazing. Under the proposed system, everyone has a fair chance at a bonus if they have a sudden spark of creativity, and it encourages people to be socialable and/or creative.

Whereas now with the system currently in place, we're constantly bickering over a socially-awkward system that can and is easily gamed and griefed, is sluggish to change, offers little reliable information, and often misused.

Very nice Kex.. I have always missed the voting stations. Was always fun to log in to see how many votes you received and it was rewarding to know that people actually stopped by to at least glance at your build.

I agree that the current system is in need of a facelift.

Thanks for catching my ambiguity. Instead of "the more time you spend with other people" I should have said "the more uninterrupted time, beyond something like five minutes, you spend within communication distance (<100m) of other people". Actually, the distance should probably be greater than chat distance (20m) but less than shout distance (100m). Let's average and say 60m.

Or beets.

But this system is also easily gamed/farmed. Log in, park yourself in the welcome area, Stage 4, or cordova, set up something to move your mouse periodically, and go to work/sleep/watch tv.

Actually I see this as worse than voting, as you'd have lots of "zombies" logged into SL just to rake in more personal dwell. This would make socializing more difficult as you'd have difficulty telling who's really there or not when you walk up to a group of people.

Besides, I still contest the idea that someone being "socialable" should be rewarded while someone else who prefers to work alone adding valueable and creative content to the world should be overlooked.

Every system that will reward people with money will be gamed. I think the simpler the system, the less easy it will be to exploit. A very simple vote button as a "pat on the back" would probably do the best job with the least difficulty to implement.

I like some things about this idea, but don't like others.

Personaly I don't like being "labeled" even if its a good label, that system kinda makes labeling more er... enabled? someone could look at my profile, see alot of people think of me as a builder and think I only do builds. When maybe they've just never seen or known they've seen my scripts in action. Same could be applied for anything. The whole mostly being this or mostly being that kinda bugs me too.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong though. I dunno, I'm starting to change my mind about it the more I think about it.

Maybe also have it so that you can do more than one for each person, and also have it be a percentige slider or a selection thing...

Example being, Bob goes to Alice's profile and does the following:
How would you describe the following for Alice?
Builder - (options would be maybe a slider 0%-100% or none-awsome) 60%/Pretty Much Building
Scripting - 20%/Very Little
Clothing - 0%/None

Etc. Where you can edit more than one and select more than one for each and rate accordingly.

That may be too complicated though, I'm just trying to throw out whatever ideas here, simply clicking Yes/No doesn't always apply, someone may do some building here and there, etc.

I like the friend/foe system and such, but I'm a little reluctant to say *just* friend and foe should be showed in profile, this could then be abused (even though it doesn't count towarda bonus people would still cause a ruccus about it). But then again any system where you can negativly gauge someone can and most likely will be abused.

I like the idea of having to continuesly rate someone to keep their bonus up, however that does require more effort on peoples parts, say your flying by and see something really cool, ok, click, rate positive. After a few days your flying around and see something else really cool by the same person, oh I already rated them, do I really want to again? Having to keep rating people over and over and over again even if they do deserve it can get tedius.

And what if someone makes something REALLY cool like DarkLife that may not be updated constantly or something really cool thats historical but not worked on all the time, do you keep re-rating the person? If they deserved to get a great bonus do you rate them every day? Thats 1$L for every vote, every day, for how long?

Would the build rating in this system only be selectable through a build or also available in someones profile? What about appearence/personality, profile too or only when the person is standing infront of you?

Like I said I like the idea, I'm just trying to see it from other perspectives and see if there are any holes and if they would be greater/lesser than the system we currently have.

The pros would be a greater choice of how to gauge someone(talking about all the suggestions now) and not have such a basic system. Also for the constant re-rating of people it would be another way to get L$ moving through the economy, even if it is 1 at a time.

That would be fine. My main goal is to get away from the "Builder: Postiive/Neutral/Negative" concept as a way to describe what someone does. The problem with giving someone the ability to give points to all categories without taking away from others is that people will abuse those categories to give flattery, as they do now with the build rating. People check a positive build rating because they want to give the person more credit, effectively making the build rating useless as a measure of someone's build ability.

By creating a table of defining characteristics, we can still tell what a person is good at, without all the noise and false flattery. There's no reason to intentionally mis-label anyone here because they will get no benefit from it, so the results will be more accurate in reflecting who's the best builder, who's the best scripter, etc.


I think this system more accurately reflects how to respond to someone you meet than the current rating system. If you don't like their behavior, then they are best classified as a foe. If you like them, then you have the option to associate them as a friend. This gague basically serves a couple of purposes:

- It shows you how socialable someone is
- It shows you how acceptable their behavior is to the community
- It is less socially jarring to have someone rate someone as a foe than it is to just outright rate them negatively. Instead of explicit punishment (as it is now to neg someone), you're just declaring your relationship to that person.


It's not much different from the vote boxes. At least you have the option to re-rate them for a job well done. I think this system would much more strongly promote good behavior, inspire people to keep making new things (instead of resting on their accomplishments), and help resolve that nagging sense of wanting to rate someone again who did something especially amazing.

In the end, it works out. If you don't think a build is worth the effort to rate every week, then it wasn't worth it. But this would make the bonus a fresh reward, to be given to those who made the best accomplishments that week (or those builds that have endured and continue to be worth people's efforts to trek out to in order to vote on).


Perhaps this is a good point in the debate on whether to reset your ability to vote every day or every week. It would be a lot less tedious to do it every week, so maybe that would be best.


I'd put it right in the profile, that way it's generic. Just like the voting cubes didn't require any reason. You don't need a reason *why* to vote someone, just the desire to do it. It can be for any reason, or no reason.


Agreed. It's not a prefect system--no social system is. But I think it'd be a great improvment over what we have now because it separates bonus from character, yet still allows you to define and gauge both.

I know! Do away with ratings all together, and replace the descriptive checkboxes we have now with Kex's rating system for a SELF LABELING system.

Self Labeling?

If you mean only you yourself can rate yourself, then you'd get people who are great at everything apparently, heh.

If thats not what you meant, please explain.

And yeah Kex, I see your points about that. Its not a flawless system, but like you said there really isn't one.

Btw, the system I proposed for "votes" to determine bonus shouldn't necessarily be considered the only solution to accompany my original post.

It was just one way to separate the bonus calculation from the social networking and defining characteristic aspects.

If anyone can think of a better way to gather statistics from the community in order to calculate bonus, while being unlinked to, but accompanying the original proposal, I'd like to hear them.

Basically all the rating systems are doing is "polling for praise" and a monetary reward.

Let's look at each one in turn: Why rate people? We rate people so that we have some means of seeing what kind of person we're dealing with. Ladies, wouldn't you just love to have that kind of service available in RL?

But we don't have that in RL, (at least not were anyone can get a hold of easily), so we really shouldn't have one in SL.

On alternative is to make viewing a profile something the owner of that profile must approve. You click on an AV and then click "Request Profile".

That's one option.

Another is to present people with a limited profile with just that information you want to reveal. You can still be rated, but the rating would be without any knowledge of other ratings.

Second, I'd rate folks on a 5 point scale, 1 is the worse, 5 is the best. And I'd include ratings for building and scripting skills as well as for sociable skills.

Bonuses

Bonuses, as in real life, should be awarded to those to those people who do something to improve the community: Teach, entertain, organize, and other areas, including those fuzzy areas such as cultural enhancement and artistic expression.

It means you have to do something for others, provide a service that no one else is willing to do, organize meetings, etc. You have to do something in SL other than just being there. It means you have to engage in a bit of self promotion, an area that I'm not comfortable with, but it would be necessary.

How would all of this work? Beats me, as I can see it spawning a whole 'nuther set of ratings that you'd have to engage in.

Ideas?

Okay this is jus to get people thinkin... basically these are a few sorta 'out there' ideas that im not even suggesting LL *TRY* to use but simply to show that the bonus system doesn't have to be based on a 'who has the most' mentality

How about.. if going from kex's system as a rough base... people have a general category they will likely end up in... We could have three basic types of bonuses.. 'specialists', 'socialites' and 'scholars'...

the socialite bonus would be awarded based on the number of different 'types' of people who consider themselves friends to you.. aka you meeting and socializing with the broad range of people who make up the SL community. it could be comprised of roughly the magnitude of yer 'weakest' friend type aka the type of SL people whom you have the least contact with... combined with a factor based on the total people who consider themselves friends to you... and roughly be composed of a 'pool' similar to the 'weekly' bonus now given that this would be a type that would encourage


the 'specialist' would be restricted to the 'creative' types (aka you'd qualify through one of your predominant traits being, using kex's original templates as an example, builer, scripter, or artist

there, the bonus could be calculated based on the number of 'like' types that view you or your work favorably... aka yer specialist bonus, if you specialize in scripting, would be compared as a cross section to the people whom also have high scripting ratings, with some minimum amount of bonus for even qualifying so that people who do spend alot of their time workin on buildings, once they qualify as specialists (either by getting rated as such by others, or by declaring themselves as such (and possibly forgoing the 'soclite' and 'scholar' bonuses) could be guaranteed a fairly steady bonus income that would rise as they became recognized in their chosen field by other people...

if you wanted to get really nuts you could even institute some kind of 'board' where yo qualify as a builder, you'd submit a project, and a group of recognized players in that field could come and evaluate it, either granting you the 'specialist' mark, or helping correct mistakes and offering further advice.


the third basic type could be 'scholar' which would basically be for new players... and would reward new players for taking the effort to learn about SL... basically mentors and teachers could give people attending classes and general SL events a special pip on their profile for events they attend... and their weekly bonus can be guaranteed per event or class that they've fully attended (up til they have been in SL say two months, or have a certain number of 'friends' so that they would have graduated into the socialite category)


now clearly this is HUGELY complicated and i wouldn even *dream* of tryin to figure out how to kludge it into SL... but still i jus want to show some ideas other than jus 'rate me i need MONIEZ' that we're workin with now.

Hey if enough people brainstorm up stuff we're bound to stumble across some easy to implement, fair, and axctually *USEFUL* rating and/or bonus systems that could replace the mess we have now

I mean: Do away with ratings.

Period.

Then REPLACE the checkboxes that we have in our profiles (the ones that say "I can Script/Build/Talk/StandUp" with a percentage thing like Kex's so that we can say "I'm 27% coder, 15% socialite, and 58% evil genius" or whatever.

I realize that I just repeated myself, practically word for word, but hopefully that explains it better.

hmm how about a little extetion to kex's idea.. instead of jus say 8 predefined 'types' for people to be in SL... have those types, and then let each person add in a custom item in that list that *they* feel defines them...

aka if you spend a large amount of yer SL time imagining ways to create giant 400 foot tall walking mechanoids with laser beam turrets, primed to take out entire cities... adding 'evil genius' to your list may just make sense (and add a little bit of a personal touch to peoples' profiles/standing)

Meta-talk:

I'm beginning to think there's no system that a majority of people can agree on, because everyone is looking out for their own best interests, usually at the expense of another group.

Oh well, I guess it was worth a try... It seems pointless to discuss this further though, as any near-consensus is highly unlikely.

Without strong consensus, I think LL would be highly reluctant to implement any changes on such a fundamental system. Therefore continued discussion on the matter seems kinda pointless.

I'm with Mol on this one -- do away with the ratings altogether. What's the point? -- except to create some kind of high-schoolish plurality on who's cool and who's not. Money? There are other ways -- and besides, isn't there a word for trading money for social relationships? Behavioral enforcement? C'mon, there are some real psycho stalkers operating in SL, and they hardly have any negs at all. An easy introduction? You won't find much meaningful or dependable information on anybody's profile page.

Give everybody a blank page, and encourage them to write their own introductions. I can tell a lot more about a person I've just met from what little they've written in the tiny boxes than from capricious ratings or vague "interests". If behavioral enforcement is the issue, then design an inworld peer system that works better than a corrupted popularity poll.

As far as quantifying social relationships in SL, I'm not sure why a person would want to. More hit points? Better weapons or magic spells? Level up? Or are we back to money? I applaud the effort to reform the ratings systems, and I think it has value. But I seriously wonder whether the assumptions behind the system are basically flawed from the beginning.

One interesting thing about the current system is it is an indicator of how gregarious you are (or how hard you try to farm ratings. It means nothing else as far as I can figure)

So people who don't play a lot, are less active, more hermit like, don’t farm ratings, and perhaps introverted people will tend to have lower numbers.

…hmm thinking about it ….the current system mildly economically discriminates against introverts.

Bad Lindens, Bad. You guys should know better.