When everybody's special, nobody's special.

Seconded

Because a meaningless gold star, to some people is still a gold star, to others, it's meaningless.

Have you read this article? http://www.instructables.com/community/Pro-Membership-details-more-visible-ratings-calcu/


"Ratings are higher. Based on comparisons throughout the entire Internet (well, OK, only a small part of it, but we tried to take a diverse sample) we realized that Instructables' star values were lower by comparison than most other places, for content that's comparable or better. So we are bumping them up a star. Yeah it's ratings inflation, so sue us. Your Instructables are as good as anything else on the web, and often far better, and we want to make sure the world in general sees that. The actual update is going to happen in stages over the next few days as there are a lot of ratings to change and we want to avoid the possibility of a site slowdown from so much database work all at once. Anything you rate from now on, though, will show the new values immediately."

Yes i read that.

You did, but I'm willing to be the original poster (running a week or two behind the rest of us) didn't bother.

??

It's like Instructables Robot subscribed to all the K'nex'ers and rated their ibles a 6.0 because it can. That's about accurate.

I hear you. Here's something the update didn't mention:

We've experimented with lots of different rating algorithms, and quite frankly none of them have been very good. The most recent version kept everything hovering around a 3 for way too long, even if everyone gave it a 5 - not in line with what the raters intended. It has previously been impossible to reach 5, even if everyone rates it a 5 - and that's just not right. Our algorithm was just not very good.

The big reason we swapped the ratings to match with other sites: they'll be appearing in Google search. Most people who search have never been to Instructables before, and they're scrolling along a page with other sites that also have ratings. Knowing nothing else, would you click on something that had a 3.5 rating, or a 5 rating? We're changing things up to make sure your projects get the attention they deserve.

This is great information, Canida! Would you be willing to add this (either in the topic itself, or as a sticky comment) to the main FAQ about the rating system? It'd be nice to get that updated with a description of the new algorithm, too :-)

Agreed, that makes more sense.

Seconded.