I submitted a picture tonight and after the update it now as a c-index of 25 and it doesnt even have votes yet. I am assuming that is just because it gets points for whatever views and downloads it has and the c-index is unrealistic so far. But my photograph "wild flowers" had a c-index of 88 for its first day on, and now suddenly its a 99! Whats going on. Not to mention I've seen a few hundreds on the new server, never seen that before. Has the algorithm been tweaked a bit, or am I just dumb?
100's pop up occasionally. They will usually revert to 99 the next day; somepeople have even had scores higher than 100 before... c-indexs can change dramatically in one day if a few people vote on them. I have had images that have low scores on the first day, and then double it the day after... I think it just depends on when you upload, and who looks at it... eg you might upload an image 30 minutes before the update, one person looks at it and doesn't download, maybe gives it a 4 for some reason; so when the update goes through your score might be 35 or something. THen the next day all the regular members go through the gallery and give more appropriate votes, so after the next update your score increases dramatically. I don't know if that is exactly what happens, but it makes sense I think.
i personally can't think of one, but i think there needs to be a different way to vote, because there are just so many 99 ratings. 99 should be only for very very special pictures...i dont know though, just throwing out my thoughts
I remember seeing something about adding the raw rating to each users Caedes Control, but has there ever been mention of including it on the image page as well (say, in parentheses followind the c-index). Pictures above a 90 in the raw rating are rare indeed, even among those with a c-index of 99. I generally have to sort my images in the image rankings by author for a convenient way to even see the actual ratings. It would certainly be nice to have this information in the Caedes Control, and perhaps on each image page as well for everyone to see? There are of course bound to be exceptions, but I think it would separate the best of the best. Perhaps it could even be a sorting option for the image galleries at some point. The data is there, why not use it in some way?
I just put my picture in about 11:00a.m. on 06/09/04..."Caedes Day Care" and by 6a.m. on 06/10/04 it's c-index was 99. It's in the Image Rankings, but I just can't see this possible in so short of time, and knowing that there are better pictures then that on here that aren't rated that high that should be! There are images in here that should be rated way higher than a lousy 99. And I've seen pictures that shouldn't be rated at all that are getting ratings HIGHER than the ones that aren't that should be. And I know how some of these people feel about this but doesn't want to speak their opinion on this subject. ( I'm just speaking mine ). Thank You.
I completely agree with everyone, I saw a picture in he smallest possible resolution that was still fuzzy, and a terrible shot, and it was rated a 99, i dont remember the name of it though.
To go along with this; I was thinking maybe the Author List should take more into account quality versus quantity. So if it factored in a person's average C-index, that may make it more appropriate. The Author List doesn't matter but it's still nice to have, but as it stands, us veterans who have been using the site for well over a year, or even more, have an unfair advantage. It would help spotlight new and uprising talent; and account for like I said, quality versus quantity.
Bob: Unfortunately average c-index isn't really fair either; for example, I could upload one image that gets a 99 rating and not upload any more; then I would be at the top of the list, above anyone who had even one image that was rated less than 99...
As for the rating being used to sort images in the galleries, I think it would be good to have it as an option, and keep sort by c-index as well. I guess you could also sort the author gallery by rating, but there are problems with the ratings as there are with the c-index; for example, one of the factors the rating takes inot account is views compared to downloads; with older images, I would imagine that this ratio will be much lower than a relatively new image. I might have gone through Pierres gallery several times, but I'm not going to download images that I have already looked at before. Besides, if you sort the image rankings by rating, you will notice that the names that appear most commonly at the top of the list are much the same as those at the top of the current author list. I imagine that the things mentioned in this discussion were all considered by caedes when he was developing the site; there are always going to be flaws in any ratings/voting system, but personally I think the c-index is a pretty good one.
As far as what people were saying with the author list. I think its sorted fine. Its not meant to bring the best artists to the front, but rather the major contributors, makes sense.
One option might be to let members choose what order the authors are displayed? THat way there would be no "best" or "worst" any more. Possibles: Average c-index; Total c-index; alphabetical; date member joined. Again it depends if caedes wants to bother doing the programming.
I've been thinking of a good way to weight the author list so that authors with high rated images are more likely to be at the top. One way to do this would be to sort the gallery by the sum of the square of the author's c-indexes. This would put a greater emphasis on quality over quantity. Higher order weights (sum the cubes) would further emphasize quality.
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Bertrand Russell
Completely agree with samatar. I like seeing the most contributing people at the front, but at the same time I would like to organize it by name everynow and then. (Especially when trying to find a new user with no pictures uploaded yet)
As I understand new users who have not uploaded any pictures yet do not appear in the author list (since they are not yet authors and have no thumbnail to represent them). The sum of squares sounds like a good incorporation of a solid mathematical foundation and I'm betting the order of the author list will not change very much except maybe in the higher page numbers. The sum of cubes sounds a bit over-the-top for weighting quality over quantity but maybe not, I haven't done the math. I guess it would be convenient to be able to sort the author list by name as well, but that can be done pretty easily by using the image rankings instead (since the new update). On that note, however, I think the alphabetically sorted (by author) image rankings would be slightly easier to navigate if they were not case sensitive. I don't know how easy that would be to change or if you'd even want to but it seems a bit counterintuitive the way it breaks up and repeats the alphabet due to capitalization.
After reading Joost's comment and looking at the author list again. I see her point. You can put alot of "what ifs" out there, like what if a user has a ton of bad pictures. They end up in the front. But this is n ot the case. Most of the users in the front have as many pages of images over a c-index of 90 as I have total images. I think the sorting method seems to be working.
Just as an experiment I changed the author list to sort by sum of cindex squared. The results on the first page are not very different, however I did move up a few notches! =)
Torque, so you know, caedes said he would fix the case sensitive thing in the post on the homepage. Maybe in the next upgrade?
Noobguy, if someone had a ton of bad pictures, the images wouldn't make it to the permenant gallery and would be deleted, so as you say they would never make it to the "top". As I said before, I think caedes considered all these points when he originally programmed the site; this guy knows what he's doing!!
Maybe there should be a "newcomer" c-index for the early birds here and a "granny" c-index for the ones that have been here the longest whose showed their support so long. Something to think about, I just feel that if it weren't for some of the ones thats been here for a long time, Caedes might not be here today.
"After reading Joost's comment and looking at the author list again. I see her point. You can put alot of "what ifs" out there, like what if a user has a ton of bad pictures. They end up in the front. But this is n ot the case. Most of the users in the front have as many pages of images over a c-index of 90 as I have total images. I think the sorting method seems to be working."
But when you get down to that, the problem is with how people vote and not the technical side of how it's calculated. Many images receive a score of 10 by rote. The biggest problem here though is what I will call "buddy voting". People give their buddies 9 or 10 regardless of the image's merits.
"ob: Unfortunately average c-index isn't really fair either; for example, I could upload one image that gets a 99 rating and not upload any more; then I would be at the top of the list, above anyone who had even one image that was rated less than 99..."
That's easily solved by not using a flat-out average. If it's a composite score that takes into ACCOUNT the average, that would be much more fair. It could allow someone who has 20 images with 99% to outrank, say, someone who has no 99%s but over 100 lower images. But it wouldn't allow someone with JUST one 99% to outrank someone with two 99%s and a few low 90%s. And it could be simply done.
I really think this is the best way to even up the score. There are definitely members who only upload an image MAYBE a few times a month, if not less, but who are consistently amazing, and then members who upload a few times a week and outrank them even though they quality is no where near as good.
It's like the old argument of the "Great Compromise" where the small states of the US got equal representation in the Senate, but the big states got proportional representation in the House. The artists with fewer images, but high quality, should benefit from that (The Senate) and those who maybe aren't as quite as consistent but do have a larger body of work still get their points (the House).
I've noticed something about the images that get high ranking on Caedes. Not all are the best photographs (I talk about photos, because that's my area of interest.) Some are just the best wallpaper. Here's something to ponder - Caedes is about wallpaper - not just high-quality art. I have a shot that's mostly water and a frame of greenery. This one did better than a much better shot of a statue in a garden - the latter had a subject, and the former did not.
Sometimes the ratings show which image is the best wallpaper, not the ones that are the best art. The downloads count may reflect the suitability as wallpaper more than the quality of the photo. Hence I'd favor showing the raw vote score to represent the photo's quality.
I dont know about that. I think that still falls under quality, or appeal of photo. I tend to like nature photographs better than ones with a subject as you were saying. I would have probably liked your water/greenery photo better than your statue photo (even in print).
WOAH! i think i just thought of an idea that may solve this whole problem! Why dont, instead of having you pick a rating beweeen one and 10, you have a number of qualities to grade. Like Content, Quality, Focus, Lighting, etc... Is this a good idea??
theres alot of different types of images on the site, if u tried that you may have to have a different rating system for each category. some of those are hard to rate ie: focus on pics that are intentionally blurred. but it would be a good idea to have a couple different things to rate it on, just not sure how u would go about it.
Someone suggested that once before. The problem is that it is hard enough to get people to vote already, the more complex and time consuming it is the less people will do it.
I think that if we decided to have judging based on multiple catagories then the number of catagories and topics would be (basically) an arbitrary decision. Having only one catagory to vote on is just as arbitrary but benifits from being the simplest choice (KISS and all that).
I have been thinking of other ways of ordering images which would be more like a game, (such as having a comparison of two images where you choose the best). A system like this would alow us to order the images from best to worst while avoiding the problem of grade inflation.
This stuff is really confusing... My "Misty Sunrise" pic was at a c-index of 32 the first day, then i check the next day...and it was @ 98...now its at like 84 i think... How do you come up with the c-index any ways...Whats the system. Im confused. I thought it was the average rating that other users gave you. Anyways...just asking what was on my mind. I have one more question though:
Can you burp underwater??? think about it (its confusing, dont got the answer yet lol)
"I have been thinking of other ways of ordering images which would be more like a game, (such as having a comparison of two images where you choose the best),"
Ooh, a game!! We like those! *jumps up and down, claps hands*
haha. Another reason i brought up that Catigorizeds Grading scale i dea was for pictures like this. The Goodies and the Osama lamp. Sure it's nice art, but the photograph is "substandard". So it would make it hard to vote simply 1-10 on the that picture, what exactly are you grading??
You would give it lots of points for content, and take away point for photoquality, rating it around a 7 or so. Everyone makes categories in their head and rates based on that
I doubt that photo will get enough votes to have a c-index. I just uploaded it with the intention of sharing it with some of the regular members, after a week so I was planning to delete it.
I don't know why I didn't look at this earlier, but the C-index distrubution shows it. The mode is NINETY FIVE! That's insane; followed by 90 and 100! We really should be seeing, if not a true bell curve, a mode of like 70. An average picture must be at almost 90? That's insane. I don't think anyone would agree that most works on here deserve a 9/10! We all should keep this discussion open.
Some of the other important sites similar to Caedes (the others focus even more exclusively on photography than here, if that's possible) are ten times harsher, with rankings much much lower and tougher. I think those sites are perhaps TOO stringent, but compared to them it's looking like a playground here. Most of it is people's mentality to "be nice" and rate high.
What about limiting the number of votes you can give out in terms of points? It will force people to be less generous with their rankings. We can figure out about how many images the average user votes on each day, and go from there. Say if people vote on an average of 5 photos, then you could be limited to giving 40 points a day. So you can't give all images 10s, and you'll have to think about it.
The only way that wouldn't work is if people simply voted on less images, but I don't think that would be the case. Thoughts?
i made this post because I thought that the c-index algoithm may have changed, or the time that it was updated or something had changed since the server switch. I didnt have too much of a problem with the actual c-indexes, they are on average high because of the algorithm it uses. Its not because of how people rate the images, people rate them fine, very few images with a c-index of 99 have a rating above 90, mostly in the 70s as u said the average should be, some in the 80s.
Reddawg: Re your distribution comment. Remember that is calculated from all the images on the site. So all it really means is that the majority of images in the permenant galleries are rated about ninety five, which is fine. It doesn't necessarily mean that people are voting too high, it could just mean that the lower rated images aren't being moved into the permenant galleries and are being deleted; thus a very high average.
I think the whole c-index thing is misleading and confusing. Most people don't really know what it is.
Currently on an image, we can see number of views & number of downloads. Why not scrap c-index altogether and show number of votes and average vote and number of favourites. So:
It's just an idea, and it's a lot more data to look at, but people can make of it what they will.
I think that not only is the c-index meaningless (particularly as hardly anyone seems to know how it is calculated) but it is also interpretive insofar as it is taking the raw data and spitting out an answer that noone really understands.
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Bertrand Russell
c-indexes are a good way of ranking images- comparing them. by your logic, you would have to rank the images by just one of those traits, the c-index takes all of those into account, making a system to rank the images by.
The solution I've developed in me own little head is this: c-index is a general rating of popularity. It is only generally related to quality. The "Caedes Control" panel gives more information about the photo, but I would *really* like to see "raw score" there, so I can tell how heavily weighted is the vote. Frequently I download images just to see what all the hoopla is about, only to realize it's not an image I want to use as a wallpaper, or it isn't as good as I thought. Because of this behavior the ratio of views to downloads may not be as important as the actual vote.