@jaff8 -- Reviewing 1ramp's Unique Features. He discussed at length the Rating feature on 1Ramp.
you do not upvote post on 1ramp, you rate it. Just the way apps are rated on Google Play Store, you rate posts from creatives. A 5-star rating on 1ramp is equivalent to a 100% upvote on Steemit, while a 1- rating is equivalent to a 20% upvote. That means a 4-star rating is an 80% upvote over here, 3-star rating is a 60% upvote, as well as a 2-star rating is a 40% upvote.
Japheth also pointed out a few flaws in this feature. One flaw was --
The rating system is great, similar to most rating systems out there. My advice is it shouldn't discourage you.
Ratings convey the quality of a post if done consciously. That is what 1 to 5 stars on the rating scale signify. But when we link that to the voting percentage, which in turn influences the vote value, things get tricky.
People with higher vote value use their upvotes judiciously. In many cases, an upvote below 20% voting power doesn't mean that the content is poor. Since most of the Steem users use Steemit and busy for upvoting with variable vote value, the ratings you see on your 1Ramp profile are not truly 'Ratings' on the content (but a calculated value based on our algorithm).
We realized that low ratings may discourage creators and we wanted to solve this problem through design. One approach is to show voting done through other Steem interfaces and ratings via 1Ramp separately. That would've been a design approach to tackle the challenge. But we don't want the design to be cluttery and not in sync with other platforms. Maintaining a consistent user interface (and underlying experience) across Steem ecosystem is also something that Dapp developers on Steem should keep in mind. So for now, we tweaked the rating calculation algorithm to lift the average ratings on the 1Ramp platform.
In our older average rating calculation algorithm, the voting percentages were rounded up to the nearest value of 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 (1 to 5 stars respectively).
The data showed that many promo-bots upvote below 20% voting power. That alone brings down the average ratings and is very discouraging for the users.
In the updated algorithm, we are purposefully not including the upvotes below 20% voting power. That ensures that the average rating on posts never goes below 1 star on 1Ramp. The upvotes recorded on the Steem blockchain remains as it is, the algorithm tweak is only limited to the interface of 1Ramp. The upvotes with a voting percentage above 20% are rounded up to the bigger number in multiple of 20. For example, a 45 % upvote will be considered 60% (3 stars) for the sake of calculation.
It was not easy for us to come up with this idea and implement it on the platform. We brainstormed and internally tested a couple more ideas in a session. We believe that the rating feature on 1Ramp is one of our defining distinctions and this will prove itself a good source of feedback for the creators on their posts. The implementation of it will improve along with our design and product iterations.
If you've any suggestions regarding ratings on 1Ramp, pelase leave them in the comments or reach out to us via discord.
Thank you 😇
