Interesting random observation

Just for fun, I did a gallery search to see photos ranked in order

of 'Aesthetics' from the 'Past Year.' I was very intrigued to see

that 13 of the top 21 photos from the past twelve months, in terms

of average aesthetics score, were posted in the past 4 weeks. And

most of these have several dozen ratings already, so it's not a

matter of them having one '7' rating and ending up at the top of the

list. Is this a typical result, that somehow photos have higher

scores at first, or is this some evidence of "grade inflation" in

recent weeks, or are people just posting better photos lately,

or ??? Anyway, just thought it was interesting.

 

I know there are little Mutual Admiration Societies that form in the

photo rating community, but I don't think that explains this datum.

By the way, the recency effect is also there for "Originality" and "Average Rating", although not quite as strongly. I guess this points to average ratings dropping over time in general, although I'm not sure why that would be. Or maybe I'm missing something about how these particular filters are calculated.

It's an interesting observation, but I don't know what it means!

 

Assuming the search you ask for is, in fact, being done (i.e. it looks at every image for the last 12 months) then I can only assume it's rating inflation.

 

It's possible that as a site becomes more popular and the audience more diverse but less experienced, anything that looks nice gets a 6 or 7. Perhaps in earlier days more of the audience were serious photographers who didn't give out so many high scores.

 

I guess it's equally possible that the search algorithm doesn't do what you think it does. If you select "all" images, that's about 500,000 images to look at and 20x that many ratings to average and sort. It would probably be quite a while before that result came back! I know some of the searches are cached to speed things up so maybe fast results are just the cache being served rather than a current sort being done.

There has been steady ratings inflation on photo.net for nearly two years. Last September,we normalized ratings in order to address this. There was such an outraged outcry from people that we were messing with their ratings that we caved and restored the original ratings. At the same time, we changed the scale from 1-10 to 1-7. This change, we kept, with a lot of grumbling. This temporarily halted the inflation, but it has since returned

If this is viewed as a bad thing, then we could tell them why we

think it's bad and ask them to stop it.

Yes I think there is a ratings inflation. My old pictures that were rated in 2001 have terrible scores, the new ones score much better.

I like to think that I have maybe I've become a better photographer.

I have noticed that the standard of presentation has improved over time most people now frame their work so it looks better.

With image editing being more common now people can improve pictures too. Maybe there is more of a feel good factor so people are more inclined to rate higher and this effect maybe snowballs.

But is this a bad? I don't really know, probably not. It is more that people like something and say it's good, and that can't be a bad thing.

Sorry for going on.

Cheers Stuart d:-)

It's not a freak occurence Philip. This topic has been addressed many times in the past. As previously stated, many things contribute to "ratings inflation". If you browse through the previos thread, you will find several that deal with the topic. thanks for noticing.