The rating system on store.kde.org and the Get New widget annoys me to no end

General
1

I am a new KDE user (I’ve been using GNOME for years) and one thing that has bugged me to no end is why the perceived quality of community-contributed downloadable content is so low.

(screenshot of the Get New widget removed because of new user limits on this forum. Ugh.)

Every time I use the Get New widget, I am surprised by how “average” they are, i.e. the rating doesn’t stray very far from 5 out of 10 stars.

This content comes from store.kde.org, which is the actual source of this idiosyncratic and, I would argue, just misleading scoring system:

Screenshot_20230619_153914
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You might be surprised to know how users have actually rated the products in this screenshot:

  • Mudeer has four 10/10 ratings. Yet it’s been assigned a 7.2/10 rating.

  • Polonium has one 6/10 rating and six 10/10 rating. Somehow it’s a 7.6, instead of a 9.2 rating a weighted average (StackOverflow link redacted) calculation would suggest.

  • Karousel has a single 10/10 rating. The store decides that’s worth 5.8

None of this makes any sense mathematically, nor to how people judge and calculate ratings in the real world. These nonsensical numbers all come from the strange concept that anything uploaded on the store starts at 5, which makes no sense whatsoever and it’s even worse when this 5 that should represent neutrality is transposed to a 5/10 star rating which has a totally different meaning. A 5 score is a dimensionless number, but 5 stars out of 10 is a very clear and agreed upon indicator of this thing is not very good.

I haven’t been able to find where the code of store.kde.org is located, so here is my plea: please fix this weird rating system that is somehow coalescing all community-contributed content around a mediocrity score.

I know this is good nerd-snipe to discuss the pros and cons of scoring systems (recency should have a lot more weight than it currently has), but first, let’s fix scores and have them operate like the rest of the world expects. It doesn’t help the image of KDE to new users if everything they can download for it is plainly mediocre because of a silly scoring system.

(More screenshots and links removed because the forum software keeps complaining)

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2

Hello @1player !

This store is not managed by KDE, AFAIK but by OpenDesktop.org.

See The use of Google Analytics in KDE Store - #2 by ngraham for a more “official” answer by a KDE developer :slight_smile:

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3

Thanks, good to know. The point is that the Get New widget in KDE uses it as a backend for its content, and ratings.

Screenshot_20230619_153636
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So the problem of silly ratings actually affects KDE itself, even if it’s caused by an external component.

4

Oh I know, but I don’t think KDE can do much about it.

The complaint/bug report should go to OpenDesktop is what I mean.

BUT: if you check the bottom of Ratings & Reviews for e.g. Polonium you’ll see this:

image

If you take into account those 5 5.0 ratings you’ll get the 7.6.

Now, why do they give every project a base rating of 5x5.0 is something you should ask them :slight_smile:

5

It is very weird, yes. Seems like simply removing the five 5 star default ratings would fix it I guess, if such a thing were to be acceptable to the site’s owners. We can reach out and ask.

If nothing fruitful emerges there, perhaps we can at least improve the representation in the Get Hot New Stuff window; maybe by replacing the stars with thumbs ups and thumbs downs, maybe. So like something with a rating of 7.5 internally could be represented as “one and a half thumbs up”, and something with a rating of 4.2 would be “half a thumb down.”

6

That would also have issues:

  • If you sort by rating you would see just a bunch of stuff having 1 vote with 10 stars instead of more popular stuff that has mixed 10/9/8 Star rating stuff.

  • A single vote has more impact on low rated stuff: A single 1 Star rating would pull the rating of a well liked addon down drastically.

  • probably more stuff

I don’t have a good solution either.
One option would be to do it like the AUR does it:

Popularity is calculated as the sum of all votes with each vote being weighted with a factor of 0.98 per day since its creation.

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