I'm trying to be useful. [opinion usefulness calculation]

[Moonlight Soldier]

Sooo last night I was talking to Pwolf and Dcdeveloperx, and somehow we got on to the topic of opinions. I mentioned how I could probably up my usefullness if I went back and redid a bunch of my little 30 word opinions that I'd written in my early fangurl-mode.

That got me thinking...

You see, I don't think "usefullness" = high word count. People can be terribly verbose without telling you anything at all. Further discussion prompted an idea.

What if usefullness was rated by the editor? IE: you get an opinion, you read it, and you get your own scale to determine how useful it was to you.

I know I've had opinions with a lower word count that have been more helpful than ones with a higher word count before.

Credit should go where credit is due....

[Flint the Dwarf]

I think this has been suggested before, but I can't recall why it wasn't implemented.

[yumi+chan]

What if usefullness was rated by the editor? IE: you get an opinion, you read it, and you get your own scale to determine how useful it was to you.

Well, I think that's a good idea.

[Zarxrax]

1. It would take a lot of work to implement.
2. It's not really important. Who cares how useful you are? I say get rid of the score altogether.
3. If people could rate the opinions usefullness, then people that give high scores would tend to get rated usefull, regardless of what they write in the opinion, and the opposite for people who give low scores. By the same logic that the majority of people don't know how to give decent opinions, the majority of people also wouldn't know how to rate opinions that they have been given. And really, it just over-complicates things.

[Wedding_Angel]

2. It's not really important. Who cares how useful you are? I say get rid of the score altogether.
.

me agree totally- most people just copy and paste the same thing 3 times into the 3 boxes- which makes the op unreadable anyway and totally useless- that and they fill the op with needless smiley or sad faces just to increase their score..grr

[.:SR:.]

2. It's not really important. Who cares how useful you are? I say get rid of the score altogether.

I agree with you on this one.

Just like you said, Who cares about usefulness? (Many people don't even notice why the "Usefulness" score is there)

[Moonlight Soldier]

Meh it's just an idea on how to improve something that is there. People abuse the system either way.

I love how Zarx's number 1 reason is lazyness though

[Arigatomina]

I still think 'usefulness' should be a weighted score based on the consistency (number of ops) - like we did to the op list (making number of ops add weight to the 'true' average). If they did that, I could finally be at the top of that darn list. ;p

Seriously - usefulness is a general clue as to the sort of reviews a person gives. It's true that you can ramble and not help at all, the same as you can be succinct and help a lot. But given the choice between someone with a low average across the board for 'reviews given' and a low usefulness (100 or less), or a person with a low average across the board and a high usefulness, I'd pick the high. If a person is scoring low, there should be a lot of things to talk about - explaining why the score is so low and making a high word count. For those who score high it doesn't really matter - if there's nothing wrong, they don't need to write much unless they want to point out everything they liked.

I see it like the star score - it might not be a genuine reflection of the quality, but it gives you a general idea.

Having people mark 'useful' reviews falls under 'karma' - grading the member. That aspect of the site won't come into place until 'fan management.' Maybe a few years down the road if the site still exists. ^_^;

[Flint the Dwarf]

I love how Zarx's number 1 reason is lazyness though

Or maybe it's that the people who work on this stuff already have enough to do. Cost/benefit analysis says: move to the back of the bus. Don't get me wrong, though, I'm not saying it's a bad idea.

[madbunny]

I favor the idea of leaving the 'most useful' a statistic isolated from feedback. My thought is that if the person getting the review is going to affect your score, then most people will be inclined to score higher, or even go back an lowe the scores if they get a low feedback rating.

On the other hand I can't see why a new combined score category couldn't be put in. Combine most ops with most useful to get... er... most useful. Then you have three; longest, useful, and a numerical count.

since it isn't a change to the site other than a new listpage it'd probably be easier than modifying the opinion format.