but for favorites and bookmarks, they're no more likely than likes to be only how many people see it.
Not sure if I understand that correctly...
More Favorites doesn't necessarily mean a better story. It could just be older or got more attention.
Averaging likes per chapter by "potential readers" rather than by actual readers is pointless when that's also a statistic we have for a chapter.
Potential readers: all CHYOA users
Actual readers: all users who faved the story (not all, but it's likely that it is always about the same share; readers who like chapter beyond the introduction seem to be really rare)
So currently we have "Likes per potential readers"
"Likes per Favorite" would be much more near "Likes per actual reader"
In my experience, there are nearly no users who like a chapter without favoriting the story.
Also, one of Nemo's proposed problem was that people are favoriting stories rather than liking them (I don't know if that's true myself), and if it is, your system would make it so that favoriting a story, saying that you want to read more of it, but not liking any chapters, would be even worse.
I think only about 20% of all readers use the like button.
The other 80% don't use it for whatever reason.
If 50% of the like-button-users like a chapter, it is pretty likely that also 50% of the like-button-refuseniks like the story/would press the button if they would use it.
Likewise, if there are 20% of the one, there would also be 20% of the other.
About the difference between favoriting and liking... all the readers who fav a story and read its chapters but don't use the like button have an opinion about the story, even if they don't (want to) express it. These opinions will most likely pretty similar to the opinion of the users who liked the chapter, so it will make no statistical difference if you project the actual likes to the actual readers.
If it's just likes, than those two stories you mentioned are tied, but your system scores the second one lower for having more people favorite it, meaning that authors would want people not to favorite their stories if possible.
Let's reverse the example:
Both of our example stories have 40 chapters and 100 favorites.
Now Story 1 has 480 likes while Story 2 has 240 likes.
So I'd assume Story 1 has a better quality as there is a higher percentage of readers who like it.
EDIT: there's also a typo in your math.
corrected it, thanks
(Damn copying ^^)
Yes, your system turns the favorite into essentially a new version of the dislike button, which is the exact opposite of what its sposed to be.
“I don’t think it’s as cut and dry as favorites are the new dislike.
The difference is that a "malicious favorite" would affect the higher value.
A story which had 100 Favs, 10 Likes pc and 0 Dislikes pc had a Rating of 100%
A change to 1 Dislikes pc changes the Rating to 90.9% (a reduction of 9.1%; 10 Dislikes lead to a reduction of 50%)
In case of an added favorite, that rating would change from 10% to 9.9% ( a reduction of 1.0%; 10 added Favs would lead to a reduction of 9.09%)
But it could indeed be affected by malicious activities, though it doesn't have to be the only thing of an overall ranking algorithm.
Favorites are slightly positive as they do indicate story quality.
That is the problem with favorites... while that number is indeed affected by the quality of the story, there are other aspects which raise that number like chapter depth, the number of chapters, visibility on the front page and the time when a story is visible on the front page.
@
gene.sis:
I dont't get it, why should a story with identical stats (besides the favorites) be rated worse than a story who has less favorites?
Basically, because there are more people who read it, so obviously a lower percentage of them liked it.
Does the reversed example above make it more clear?
Imagine two identical flowers. One of them is located downtown, the other can be found deep in the woods.
During the life of these flowers, they achieve following "stats":
Downtown flower: Noticed by 1,000 people, enjoyed by 500 people
Flower in the woods: Noticed by 100 people, enjoyed by 50 people
So which one of them is nicer? They are both equal, aren't they? Every second person who noticed each of them enjoyed their sight.
Now, let's take another set of flowers
Downtown flower: Noticed by 1,000 people, enjoyed by 50 people
Flower in the woods: Noticed by 100 people, enjoyed by 50 people
Which of them is nicer? Both were enjoyed by the same amount of people...
The thing is, the downtown flower just got more attention and even if it isn't as nice as the flower in the woods, the same number of people enjoyed its sight.
