[maemo-community] Application Karma

[From: Patrik Hirvinen]

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Dave Neary wrote:
> 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?

Well, several things have been proposed both here and in the comments of
the original bug, https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2179 . Yes,
stars are doing a similar thing than the faves and buries would. I'm
guessing here but Quim's proposal to replace stars with thumbs up/down
might have been partly motivated by it being simpler and thus invite
more people to do it to choose between {-1,1} rather than 1-5.

> 
>> 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/

OK, we have the number of downloads per week, but that's lagging a bit.

> 
> 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.

Implementation is probably easier than choosing a sensible formula for
complex values of formula.

> 
> Cheers,
> Dave.
> 

Of course it's possible to do both a system for a measure of what's hot
right now and overall goodness. Personally I don't have a strong opinion
on what exactly should be done(though for complex formulas there I'd
like to see some justification for why it's a good measure), but I need
some consensus or decision on what is wanted before I go ahead and
implement. ;)

- --
Patrik Hirvinen
patrik.hirvinen at nemein.com
+358-(0)40-7307117
http://nemein.com/fi/people/hirvinen/

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