nikos

I had thought about that - or something along the same lines - before.

 

One way could be to have drop-menus under every photo in the various TRP displays (not by default, but after clicking a 'rate these photos') so that one can rate en masse. Another way is what you describe: the standard serial rating interface, but giving you different selections of photos than the current one.

 

It is a great idea and many of use would make could use for it BUT: It could end up unbalancing the distribution of ratings even more than it is unbalanced now. If it is easier to rate a lot of photos from the TRP, or if the ratings interface gives you the option to feed you 'better' photos than a random selection, these will not only become the most popular ways to introduce ratings to the system; they will result in an inordinately bigger proportion of ratings for this small set of photos as opposed to ratings that go to newly submitted ones. The ratings on the newly submitted photos are vital for the system, because they kick-start the whole process, and without directing some random traffic to them, the system is even more given in the hands of the mate-rating cliques who give each other rates within hours of uploading the photos.

 

Just a thought. I'm not dismissing the idea. Actually I'd like to have a facility like the one you describe. I'm just not sure about the overall effect of something like that.

There are many advertising and sponsorship options available to a site like photo.net on the market today. I am glad that so far, photo.net seems to taking those options that, while increading revenue, do not degrade the value of the site. Ideally I would like no advertising at all, but since this is not financially viable, I am content to observe that at photo.net:

 

1. Advertising is always clearly marked for what it is and easy to visually and semantically separate from the content.

 

2. The actual content and editorial plan is not used as an indirect advertising venue, as is commonly the case with many other sites. Photo.net hasn't 'sold' itself out to any sponsor, rather deals with advertisers as customers.

 

3. Even though recently ads have been popping up in just about every part of the site, the way they appear is still reasonably unobtrusive.

 

4. Adverts are relevant most of the time. The are not senseless 'offers' for things I am unlikely to want.

 

5. Total garbage ads are rare, if any.

 

With $25/year I can buy photo.net, with great content, lots of information, knowledgeable people to converse with, and an interactive gallery space for my photos. A few ads show up here and there, reasonably and unobtrusively. If I spent the same money on a photo mag subscription, (actually they cost more) I would get a useless wad of full-page ads, with a few pages of content inside, most of it crafted to showcase products that manufacturers "donated" to the mag.

 

I really can't complain about photo.net on this issue.

 

As a last note, the one section where it could be reasonable to offer ad filtering at a premium, is the personal galery space. Some photographers would perhaps be willing to pay the equivalent of a high-end hosting fee for their portfolio pages to be laid out with less clutter and no ads. But that's a whole different issue altogether.

Check this out - old thread but still applicable

 

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=004iMc

Hanna, my taste may not be impeccable (a claim that YOU made, not I) but at least it's taste. The TRP is no longer the result of taste. It's a contest.

 

Carl, please observe that in the system I was describing users need not only balance their ratings. They also have a limited amount available. In such a system you would not see people splash a hundred 2's to 'buy' the rights to a hundred 6s. They would still have a handful of ratings. There are a lot of arguments that can be made against it, and sure there are still some ways to misuse it. The key thing to note is that the potential misuse is LIMITED.

 

I'd rather have a system where people misuse a limited rating influence, than the current one when people misuse and unlimited rating influence.

 

You can't force people to be honest and tasteful. What you can do is to make sure that each member has a fair share of power/influence over the community. Currently the amount of influence that one may have only depends on their free time and willingness to create bogus accounts. It the licence-to-print-money thing I referred to above. As soon as anything grows on trees (money or 7 ratings or whatever) it is devalued. The current value of a 7 in photo.net is approaching that of a stone with a 'well done' note attached to it.

 

I had described before the Kharma system that was invented and operated by a well-known and hard-to-manage geek community site for communal forum moderation. (whatever you may say about us geeks, we know something about online communitites) If you google 'kharma' or 'karma' along with my name for photo.net you'll find the post with a better explanation in a long thread of the past. The system not only involves arbitrary limits, but also a means of attributing more or less influence to memebers according to their level of constructive participation. (it's not a democracy, that's why it's called kharma)

 

There are variations on how something like that could be implemented. This is not as important, it's details. The important thing is that if ratings are to have any value whatsoever their allocation to raters should be limited in some way. I'm not talking about tweaking the rating mechanism. I'm talking about fundamentally changing the way it works.

Sam-m: I agree with your last statement. The best findings are through the selections of individuals with good taste. But it's getting harder and harder for those individuals to find the good stuff in the first place. It's being buried deep by the little people with the cheap 7s. I used to spend hours in the gallery looking for gems. Go look at my highest rated pages and you'll maybe find some good stuff you never noticed. But it's all dated. Because it's getting more and more difficult to treasure hunt in the gallery these days, and many of the best treasure hunters are tired and gone. We're not just dealing with rating inflation here. The problem is far more serious and widespread.

The solutions has been there all the time, it has been proposed again and again, it is mathematically guaranteed to work, and yet it has never been implemented:

 

Ratings quotas!

 

Simply enough, if you want rating to have meaning as currency they have to be limited to their proper distribution. Our current system is one where each member has the $100-bill printing machine.

 

There are a number of possible ways to attach real value to rating by quotas:

 

1. Provide users with ratings tokens in batches (1x1, 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 3x5, 2x6, 1x7) and don't give them a new batch before they use up the previous one. Users should be able to forgo use of symmetrical rating tokens (i.e. a 1 and a 7)

 

2. Allow users a maximum deviation from the average. For every 5,6 or 7 you hand out, the difference from the average (4) is subtracted from your quota. When you run out you have to replenish your quota either by waiting for some time (let's say you get a few points every week) or by contributing photos, critiques, etc to earn points. (this is what I had described long ago as the Kharma system) Unused and bogues accounts sitting there to accumulate points can easily be detected by software patterns.

 

3. Dynamically adaptive quotas across the site could adjust the number of high ratings available per user according to his/her rating behaviour and the rating behaviour of others. If site-wide rating inflation is occuring the software could choose to disallow rating higher than 5 from the N most active high-raters of last week, forcing them to step back and hand the reins of influence to other users who didn't have a rating-spree last week.

 

The principles in all of the above schemes are simple:

 

A. Restrict the handout of rating to the distribution pattern that gives them meaning (a lot of 4's versus few 1's and 7's)

 

B. Make users feel that their rating handout is a limited and precious influence, thus eliminate the mate-rating exchanges of something-for-nothing.

 

I agree with all the posters above who are foreseeing a downard spiral in the gallery. The quality of the daily selection is getting worse by the day, and the chances of honestly getting a little visibility and a few interesting comments are diminishing. There is only place left for the little peopl with the many cheap 7s.

 

Something needs be done, and it better be radical and serious. Tinkering with the order and the anonymity or not is not going to make any difference.

It's not a bad idea, and the proposed system is far better than contacting the photographer directly in some respects. First, photo.net deserves a cut off the deal, being the venue of exhibition. Second, it makes it easier for the photographer to sell the prints, with a printing agency doing the hard work and the accounting/financial issue taken care of by the system.

 

I can still see some potential problems involved:

 

1. Control over the print is an issue. Under such a system you're essentially selling someone something you have never seen and quality-checked. Even with good knowledge of color profiles etc. there's still a good chance that the buyer will end up with a print that doesn't look as good as expected, resulting in an unhappy buyer, without the photographer's control.

 

2. A whole new and very dirty angle introduced in the ratings battlefield. If the potential for sales is involved in the exhibition/exposure system (the TRP) then the motivation to cheat the system will be much greater, and the anger directed to those that do so will be even more bitter. Knowing that the exposure system can never be perfect, I can see a lot of heat generated by a print sales mechanism.

 

Of course, one could reasonably say regarding these two issues that you can't get everything perfect, and a print sales mechanism might be worth its shortcomings if many members want it. I, for one, even predicting some trouble coming from it, would still be happy to see something like this introduced in the site.

None that I know of. For quite some time, it appeared that the order of display matched the order of upload. Then it appeared to do the same in reverse. Now I have notice something of a semi-random order in my portfolio, or at least I can't distinguish any obvious ordering principle by the way it is displayed.

Brian, when I uploaded replacements for all my photos, the thumbnails took more than 24 hours to be updated. In the first 3 hours only 2-3 had been updated, and in little less than a day, not half of them were updated. Then the next day you announced the new sizing and no-compression system, so I have to do it all over again and made me feel like a I stupidly wasted my time. You hurt my feelings.

George, the apology is accepted. Your quick-to-bicker temper seems to be complemented by the confidence to apologise where it's due. It is a rare attitude and I respect it, as it is harder than the boring playing-nice/PC nonsense that plagues our culture in general.

 

Here's what I've learned after several years using this site:

 

1. Any philosophical meanderings regarding the merit and worthiness of having a ratings system are already expired. The ratings system and the TRP are vital for the site.

 

2. Dismissive arguments need not apply. The site, due to its size, history, cost, etc has certain requirements that introduce intriguing complexities in this system. With the human factor dropping into the equation, the system can never be perfect. (if you're into philosophizing about it, define the perfect selection of best photos) But it HAS evolved and it has on many occasions solved several problems. This forum is for suggestions, discussions and identifiation of such problems. Saying "do not fix this problem, because the whole system is silly anyway" will not lead to something better. Something better is the only choice. Something totally different and new and radical is not an option at the moment. All arguments and discussions are meningful only if taking into account that the site cannot re-invent and over-haul itself overnight.

 

3. Most people come here and raise issues because they bug them personally vis-a-vis their own ratings performance. But this is NOT ALWAYS the case.

Peggy, you've got a point in saying that with a 10 minimum some people would be 'buffing up' their ratings before throwing them to highly visible places, perhaps some already do with the method Carl pointed out. (very observant, hadn't thought about this)

 

George: Did you even read my post, or did you just pop in to insult me with misplaced irony and arguments that have nothing to do with the topic I raised? You can troll all you like, but next time try to at least have a point. A valid one would be even better. Failing that, the absolute minimum is to read what has been posted and keep your trolls slightly relevant.

Just an observation:

<p>

Wouldn't it be a good idea to restrict inclusion in the (now

defaulted) 'average rating' view of the TRP, until the photo has

received enough ratings to make the average meaningful?

<p>

At the moment, the #1 photo is<br> <a

href="http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?

photo_id=2585276">http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?

photo_id=2585276</a><br> with averages 6.50/7.00 (!!!) and only 4

ratings.

<p>

I am not bashing the photo, in fact I like a lot of the

photographer's work, but surely it is far from the best photo

submitted in the last 3 days, and the average quoted is hardly

representative. The 4 rating that have created this average are

probably those of friends or admirers of the photographer keen to

rate high whatever he submits.

<p>

If there was a minimum of ratings to be shown in the average view

enough to create statistical meaning of the average (say 10 or 20)

the early, unrealistic values like these would not end up on prime

display.

Ian, bots don't pay subsription fees..

 

And besides, what you describe is a common form of usage, and I wouldn't expect the software to identify it as a bot pattern anyway.

 

Bots, and dummy accounts have certain quite clearly distinguishing patterns that set them apart from honest human users. Sure, one can make a bot or false account look like a legitimate user, but that takes some effort, and for someone to create a dozen such accounts and keep them live ling enough, the effort would not be worth it. I'm sure there would be at least one person obsessed enough to do this here, but with anonymity in the interenet you have to even expect and accept that.

I think that the new system shows the large version by default if it does not exceed 680 pixels in width. (maybe it's a little less than that) But since it has been introduced very recently, it's very likely that you will see someon suggesting the large view for a photo uploaded in the past. At that time, a 650 pixel wide photo would generate a medium size for the default that was much smaller.

Here's your ideal participant:

 

Nestor Botta

http://www.photo.net/shared/community-member?user_id=320351

Carl's 'condenscending' comment is subtly making a very good point here, although nobody so far seem to have caught on with it.

 

The tough reality that many fellow members urgently need to come to terms with is that 99.99% of the world can't give a dime about critiquing their work. I have been a member here for a long time and provided numerous honest and to-the-point critiques. Yet, compared to the amount of photos I have viewed here, it seems that I only critique one in every few hundred photos that I happen to see. (including the thumbnails that I don't even bother to click) Considering the views versus number-of-comments ratio on all photos on this site, it seems that most members of the site are even less generous with spending time to write something about any given photo.

 

Is that a problem? No. It it to be expected? Yes. Let's face it: In order to get a couple of insightful critiques you need hundreds - if not thousands - of people to see your photos, to increase the odds that among these people there will be someone: (a) particularly interested in or moved by the photo (b) capable of writing something useful © willing to spend the time at the moment

 

Do an experiment yourself. There are tons of free webspace accounts on the web, and tons of free comment/guestbook software. Put one of your photos there with a box asking people to critique your work. Now wait. How soon do you think it will be until you get a few insightful critiques about your work? Not too soon I presume.

 

In order to get critiques you need some exposure. The only way photo.net can provide users with exposure for their photos is through a computer-assisted mechanism of filtering photos and ranking them. The photos submitted every day are orders of magnitude more than could fit on a few gallery thumbnail pages. Hence you have the TRP. The only way this can work at the moment is by a ratings mechanism. (or by a brigade of gallery moderators that would cost a lot to maintain and would be infinitely less objective)

 

It has been explained dozens of times before that the ratings are an essential meachanism for the site's funtion. Without it the photo.net server cannot decide on how to allocate visible spots to photos in any meaningful way.

 

If you spend some time on the 'rate recent uploads' interface like I do, you will quickly realize that a random or semi-random display is absolutely not appropriate for the gallery given the volume and everage quality of uploads.

 

So just get over it. This site is providing you with exposure that you couldn't possibly have earned yourself. Thousands of people will see your photos and some of them might even write something about it. To do that, it needs to have a ranking system. Either respect it and live with it, or build your own site and try to get the exposure yourself on your own terms.

 

There are dozens of people lately asking for an option to mark their photos as 'critique-only'. I wonder how many of them will actually do this when the feature is offered. I wonder how many of them would opt out of the mechanism that provides the visibility in this site. Actually it IS offered already. Just upload a photo and don't put it in the critique queue. Nobody will notice, nobody will rate, nobody will comment.

The whole BLOODY POINT about having a software that passes us the emails of each other (while informing the address owner) is so that EMAIL ADDRESSES ARE NOT POSTED IN PLAINTEXT ON-SITE.

 

Why? So that we don't have to endure the spam that we would receive from such exposure.

 

And yet, even though you claim to be sensitive about spam YOU receive, you don't seem to have any second thoughts about posting another member's address in plain view on this page.

 

Think twice.

Is it? How come I've never come across a way to do this? Are we talking about the same thing? The key issue here, is that I want to put photos not just in a different folder, but also not have this folder appear when someone clicks on 'all photos my Nikos Moraitakis'. Is that possible? If yes, can you please explain how?

<i>That is how my ideal participant would behave; of course, nobody I know of conforms to this ideal</i>

<p>

Not quite. What you described is almost what I do every day. I spend about 20-30 minutes with the rating interface, then occasionally I write a comment on two wherever I have something other than 'wow' to say.

<p>

<i>For one thing, it is too much like work</i>

<p>

Coming to think of it, it is very much like work. Should I send the invoice to Photo.net or you personnaly Brian?

<p>

This is a suggestion for a feature I'd like to see in the portfolio

management of photo.net. I understand that there's a lot of stuff

already planned for implementation, but maybe you'd like to keep a

not of it for the future.

 

I'd like to be able to mark a folder as an 'archive'. The folder

would then appear in my portfolio folders, but separated an marked as

an archive. It would NOT appear in the view of all photographer

photos, or in the 'most frequently rated photos'. Essentially the

folder and its photos would not be part of the photographer's

exhibition in photo.net, but they would still reside on the server,

at their URL, along with the comments, so that discussions, comments

and links from other locations in the site are not broken.

 

The rationaly is that many photographers, including me, prefer to

keep the number of photos exhibited to a limit, reducing the clutter

and presenting what they feel is their best work. This often leads to

the dilemma of removing photos, despite the interesting discussions

attached to them. It is also disparaging for other people to see

their well-thought comments disappear, or to click through some old

thread and find themselves at the dreaded 'problem with your input'

page.

 

On a side note, even when a photo is deleted, it would be nice to

keep the page of comments under a placeholder. When someone points

with a link to a discussion, instead of seeing a deleted page, I'd

rather see a page with a blank placeholder in place of the

photograph, the photographer's name and date of uplodad/removal, and

the attached discussion. Often enough, there are references to

discussions that are worth keeping, but they've vanished because the

photographer was reshuffling his portfolio presentation.

<i>Because they know that they can <b>get away with poor rating</b>/no comment critiquing.</i>

<p>

What exactly do you mean when you say this?

<p>

What is this horrible fate that they can now evade, and which was previously certain if you could see the ratings?

<p>

As far as I know, the administrators, abuse department and automated abusive-rating-pattern detactor systems can still see who rated what. And they do whatever they always did to deal with ratings abuse.

<p>

The only difference now is that you cannot see who gave you a specific rating under your photos. What is it that you used to do before to people who rated you low? What is it that they are 'getting away with' now? And why is that thing valuable and worth keeping?

<p>

Please elaborate... tell us, it's really interesting, and very revealing I must say.

Thanks Carl. I've never actually thought of myself as the 'model user' you present me to be, and god forbid I'd sure like to believe there are quite a few people with more voluminous and equally balanced contribution.

 

In any case, though, if you care to know what my experience has been after years of casual participation on all aspect of the site, I believe that with the current system, someone who has any motive whatsoever in getting some visibility, cannot afford to rate photos as I do. (yes, I do have a few photos with 50+ ratings but they've been around for years) I don't mean that I feel I deserved more or better ratings. I mean that, if instead of rating lots of stuff as I see fit I had concentrated my ratings and comments to people who reciprocate them, I could have seen my mediocre photographs decorating the TRP very often and gathering 6+ averages. (By the way, my highest-rated photo is a very boring shot of a tree, taken when I was trying to learn manual exposure)

 

The reason I can afford to have a balanced an honest contribution is because I am an average, amateur photographer, with no particular exposure ambitions and nothing special to gain from a place in the TRP. I don't think there are too many people here who are as indifferent to exposure as I am. (although they should be, because unless you are a very experienced professional, there's a lot to gain from looking at photos, perhaps more than there is from getting a few pats in the back)

 

I don't mean any of the above as a rant. But maybe it would be worth for Brian to investigate how feasible it is for someone to be an active 'gallery contributor' and an active 'critic' as well. Maybe though, his latest comments reveal that he has abandoned this vision (and I believe he has fact-supported reasons to do it) and he is gearing the site towards a split system, where users fall into two categories: photographers and viewer/critics. I wonder how that will affect the quality of the gallery and the educational value of the site.

First of all let me tell you that from my own view and opinion you are not going to be able to draw any conclusions regarding the 'appraisal norm'. This is because I try to rate according to photo.net's guidelines, and according to what the words above the numbers actually mean, something that most users have already abandoned in their rat race to the TRP.

 

You ask what we should do with the 'horrid' photos? (whichever they may be) Well, either ignore them as most people do, and only bother to rate photos above average, or if you decide you want to rate most of the stuff you see (as I do) try to rate them honestly and consistently.

 

Honestly means that the word describing the number can be ascribed to the photo. Taking originality as a basis of example, any photo that is decently composed but without any exceptional interest or novel representation of the subject should be rated as 4. If it is not just unexceptional, but in fact a typical, cliche or boring photo then it's below average, a 3. If it falls in the realm of stupidity, then a 2 is warranted. I rarely, if ever, use the 1 rating because I don't feel I can clearly distingish between 'stupidly boring' and 'very stupidly boring'. Now, if a photo is beyond just average, contains some element of novelty, smartness, interesting approach to the subject, then it should be a 5. If it goes beyond that, either being very clever, or very unique, or very meaningful, then I would consider a 6. The 7 should be reserved for true masterpieces. The photos you wish to come back to. The very rare photos that speak to your heart, enlighten you. Photos that you learnt something from.

Brian is quite right in his assumptions about why someone might have rated this image below average. I know, because I am one of the people who rated it below average. (3/3 or 3/4, can't remember exactly) My reasoning goes in a very similar manner to what Brian described.

 

1. As for originality: Tree silhouettes have been beaten to death and are hardly a novel subject. The perticular composition is typical, if not outright cliche. It is very hard to make a photo of this subject and approach it in a new, creative way that reveals some previously untold aspect of tree silhouettes. By definition, any tree silhouette photo that is not outstanding in some way is less than average originality, hence 3 sounds like perfectly reasonable score for it. Manipulation *could* potentially improve this subject in some way, but the specific halo effect, hardly did this, at least in my opinion.

 

2. As for aesthetics: Average or even below average. The manipulation spoils it in my opinion, the colours and the technical merits of the picture are nothing to write home about, and the aesthetic of the original wasn't particularly outstanding to begin with. Aesthetics is also very much a matter of taste, and without some particularly excellent photo, I think it'd be hard to argue why someone did not like this photo.

 

All in all, a photo of an overdone subject, from an overdone viewpoint, with an overdone composition, then manipulated by the application of a boring filter in photoshop gets below average rating by some people. I can't see why that consitutes a reason to complain about.

 

I have a photo of a tree in b/w in my portfolio. Hardly a radical photo. It has received quite a few 4's and 3's and I can see why. It doesn't bother me. I didn't choose to shoot a tree thinking that people would be thrown off their chairs by the shock. If 20+ people thought it was very original, it'd be THEIR honesty to worry me, and NOT that of the people who immediately identified it as a perfectly typical and average tree shot.

Click the link below:<br>

<a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-2.tcl?topic_id=1562&type=new&category=Photo%20Critique%20and%20Rating">http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-2.tcl?topic_id=1562&type=new&category=Photo%20Critique%20and%20Rating</a>

<p>

You will find more than 360 long threads of discussions on issues pertaining to ratings. If, after spending a few hours perusing the beating to death of countless complaints, ideas, suggestions and the like, you still believe you have something novel to say about ratings, come back an tell us about it.

<p>

I'd be really excited to read a really fresh opinion or idea - although I tend to believe that anything that could ever be said about the ratings system, has already been said countless times.