Why Ratings Are Not Objective.

I was also against any system of negative ratings, and I have not rated any posts. The system as it stands is NOT fine (at the least the "member ratings" should default to 3, not 5) and is open to abuse.(Although I will note that the best contributors are on the evolution side and the worst are generally on the creation side, so there is no evidence of general abuse. Nor is it plausible that the person giving '1' ratings to Buzsaw's posts is motivated by losing a debate to him - indeed as far as I know Buzsaw hasn't won a single debate here, but has lost frequently).

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In nearly 7 years? No wins? Paul, can you even spell objective?

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None that I can recall. Remember that I did qualify my statement with "as far as I know" even though you chose to snip it. Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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The dip came after a personal attack over my overall posting MO. In my defense I cited the good rating I had

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In other words, someone criticised your posts. You "defended" yourself by pointing to your rating. Unfortunately for you, your rating was not earned by producing good posts, having a lot more to do with the system defaults than message ratings (as is mine - I certainly haven't earned a 4.8).Don't you see how that might have provoked someone to show just how worthless your rating really was ?

I'm not sure that that's entirely right, Percy. The system shows a '5' as the default member rating - and my own member rating seems implausibly high to be just derived from message ratings. I think that there is likely at least one "dummy" 5 that goes into calculating the average (because it makes more sense of the member ratings we see - and it is a good idea to include dummy ratings anyway, so that the system isn't too sensitive to the first few ratings).

OK, so the system really is very sensitive when only a few ratings are given. Which is, I have to say, very poor design (which is one of the reasons I doubted that it would work like that).
A system which relies on large numbers of ratings to produce meaningful results really isn't appropriate for this setting.While I wouldn't expect a system as sophisticated as Boardgame Geek's game rating system, some effort to damp down the sensitivity to the first few ratings seems almost essential - if only because it is quite likely that many people will get only a few ratings and they will tend to the extremes (people are more likely to give a '1' or a '5' than a '3').