[maemo-community] Application Karma

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi Patrick,

Patrik Hirvinen wrote:
> The idea presented at https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2179#c11
> was to simplify things by moving to just faves and burys and use that to
> replace the stars' function to decide what's shown on the downloads
> front page ( http://maemo.org/downloads/OS2008/ )in the section "Stars"
> and on the stars page ( http://maemo.org/downloads/bestrated/OS2008/25/
> ) There are already sections for all-time popular and new apps, plus the
> featured ones. This would be used to determine what's hot right now.

 offering them a way of scaling it either -1 or 1.Aren't stars redundant
with faves & buries? It seems to me like giving someone a way to rank an
application on a scale of 1 to 5 is better than  I thought the whole
point of application karma was to mix ideas of quality, popularity and
viability to come up with an overall ranking of applications. Was I wrong?

> We don't keep data on amount of "recent" downloads. Unless what's really
> wanted is to determine an overall score for the whole lifetime of the
> application instead of just how hot it's now, this seems overly
> complicated. It's difficult to assess what would be a fair or sensible
> formula for the first purpose without looking at what kind of scores it
> would give for a large amount of typical applications.

They're stored somewhere - there's a curve of downloads on a
month-by-month basis in maemo.org/downloads when you click on the
"Download statistics" link on (say)
https://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/phonelink/

I'm suggesting using the last full month's worth of downloads as the
"recent downloads" measure. It could just as easily be the last 3 months
or the last 6 months. The point is to get an idea of how popular the app
has been recently, as opposed to 2 years ago when it was the hot new
thing on Bora.

As for the coefficients, I agree, they need tweaking to be both simple
to implement (for you) and in a reasonable range for the applications.
We don't want one app at 10,000 karma while 99% of the apps are under
10. The karma distribution should be like the person karma one.

Cheers,
Dave.

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