Ranking needed + our scalability issue

[Larry Sanger]

All,

Let me give you a little insight into how I think about this project with my community builder's hat on.

I last ranked the news several hours ago. As I glance at my Unranked queue...well, I'll show you:

First, well done, us! That's pretty good for five hours' work. Now, notice: the green background means those bitts are now in the Top Stories. The aquamarine-to-grey-colored bitts have been ranked by at least one person, but did not make it in Top Stories (which is OK! Not all of them can!). The white-colored bitts haven't been ranked by anybody.

Second, there are seven bitts that nobody has ranked in the Top Stories. They were ranked in a category, but not Top Stories. This is a problem, because I can pretty much guarantee that one or two, at least, of those stories actually belongs in our top ten, or at least that you would think so.

This poses problem. The more white-colored bitts there are, the less likely it is than anybody will rank any of them. This means that people will be adding a lot of bitts into the system but nobody will have any idea (without reading all of them) which of those new, unranked bitts are any good.

We're going to create some features soon that will help us address this problem. But until then I want to strongly urge you to rank the white-colored bitts. Does this mean that most of the bitts you rank will go in the pool? Yes, yes it does. But it is crucial that you do this if our ranking data is to be any good. Do not hesitate to put my bitts, for example, in the pool.

While you do that, please pool bitts older than 12 hours, unless they are quite unusually important. I almost always rank bitts older than 12 hours.

In the coming weeks or months we're probably going to go from 300 bitts per week to over 1,000 bitts per week. If that's correct, we will absolutely have to make a practice of ranking new bitts. We're going to make a special area of the Unranked queue and give you extra points for ranking 10 unranked bitts. We're also going to shoot for three different people ranking each bitt.

Bottom line: please rank a lot more bitts and a lot more often than you have been doing. It's crucial to maintaining a healthy ranking system!

Thanks, all!

--Larry

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Larry Sanger

Founder/CEO, Infobitt.com