This suggestion only makes sense if both of these suggestions are implemented:
- https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/360043139211-New-Page-to-View-My-Votes
- https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/360043340692-Prioritize-My-Votes
One problem with the voting system is this: if you vote passionately for some suggestion vs if you vote for a suggestion because you agree with it, but it's not a high priority for you, your vote counts the same for both votes. This is a natural consequence of the concept of voting, but isn't usually too much of a problem, because there are other things to consider besides the vote count alone.
In this post, I am suggesting user vote sort order, or "priority" as a metric to be considered alongside the vote count of a post.
To elaborate, the developers would have the option, once the "vote priority" feature is added, to process the priorities users have assigned to their votes to get some measurement of how high a priority a particular suggestion has, which has been voted on by the community. An example of how this could be done is this:
- For each vote in a post, calculate a priority percent as [priority %] = ([n] + 1 - [priority]) / ([n] + 1), where [n] is the number of things total that user has voted on, and [priority] is the priority (1 through [n]) that they have assigned their vote for this post.
- Example within an example: A user voted for 4 things. The priority percent of the #1 thing on their prioritized votes is (4 + 1 - 1) / (4 + 1) = 4 / 5 = 80 %. Their #2 item is (4 + 1 - 2) / (4 + 1) = 3 / 5 = 60 %. Their #3 item is 2 / 5 = 40 %, and their #4 item is 1 / 5 = 20 %.
- To calculate the overall priority percentage of a post, take the average of all priority percentages for the votes cast on that post.
The advantages of using the above formulae are:
- Users with more votes will have more sway on the priority of their votes at the extreme end - e.g. it is more meaningful when someone prioritizes some suggestion over 50 others, than if someone prioritizes a suggestion over two others, and going the other way, when a suggestion is prioritized behind 50 others versus when it's prioritized behind two.
- The average sway any user has on all votes averages to 50%
Some disadvantages are:
- In practice, the user will proably be more certain about the priority order about their top, say, 3 things, than they are about the priority order of their bottom 3 things. This method assumes that each two consecutive items in the list have the same difference in priority.
It might be more effective to have a graphical view, such as a box-and-whisker plot of the priorities, than to have a single aggregated number.
If such a mechanic were implemented, it may be interesting to see what posts have many votes, and are low priority, versus what posts have few votes and are high priority. Maybe some posts with equal vote counts have drastically different priorities?
Edit (x2) - links
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