The ratings experiment is over

For two weeks, Perfect Duluth Day experimented with rating systems for posts (five-star system and thumbs up/down). As you might have already noticed, the ratings have now been removed.

An initial poll showed readers either thought this was a great idea or terrible idea. (The results were pretty evenly split, but slightly leaned in favor of great idea). In practice, however, the ratings didn’t prove useful and interest in them quickly plummeted. In the end, only a handful of people bothered with them.

So now they are gone, perhaps to return another day when a better system can be figured out, or perhaps never to be considered again (except maybe in the comments to this post).

13 Comments

  1. wildgoose wildgoose on June 2, 2009 at 10:00 am

    That takes a lot of pressure off. I’m not real big on popularity contests, they make my palms sweaty, even online.

  2. Beverly Beverly on June 2, 2009 at 10:12 am

    I second what wildgoose said.

  3. mevdev mevdev on June 2, 2009 at 10:35 am

    thirded

  4. vicarious vicarious on June 2, 2009 at 10:42 am

    fourthed.

  5. eco eco eco eco on June 2, 2009 at 10:54 am

    Yeah, but I much preferred the stars to the thumbs.

  6. The Big E The Big E on June 2, 2009 at 11:45 am

    I do kind of like the idea of a Facebook-style “like” positive-only rating option. That way you don’t have the drive-by “this sucks” that just spreads negativity, but it offers the potential for some feedback on offbeat posts that might not invite much in the way of commentary.

  7. ironic1 ironic1 on June 2, 2009 at 1:18 pm

    I plead the fifth.

  8. samh samh on June 2, 2009 at 3:26 pm

    I read PDD almost exclusively via my blog reader so any functionality outside of the the user’s post would have to be included with the feed for me to use it. $0.02

  9. Karasu Karasu on June 2, 2009 at 5:24 pm

    I liked to be able to say “this sucks” when I thought it sucked (yeah, I know that’s not PC or community), but that was a very rare occurrence. It may be more popular if you can work it into the RSS feed, though, as it may be more trouble than it’s worth to those of us not coming directly to the site.

  10. bb bb on June 2, 2009 at 6:33 pm

    i rate this 5-star message thumbs up

  11. adam adam on June 2, 2009 at 7:03 pm

    *

  12. davids davids on June 3, 2009 at 10:52 pm

    yay!–rest in piece specious, unneeded manifestations of meritocratic nonsense!

  13. Test Monkey 4.0 Test Monkey 4.0 on June 8, 2009 at 1:00 pm

    test

Leave a Comment





The maximum upload file size: 1 MB. You can upload: image, audio. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop file here