kstuebin wrote:I vote on a lot of photos. It's not because I'm asking for a vote in return.
So do I. But I very rarely say that I do, simply because it may feel to the other person like there's an obligation to return the vote even though it's not intended that way. Generally the only time I'll say it is if I think that the image is so good that it's worth underscoring the point. And in response to the original post... I'd NEVER vote for anyone who asked me to.
kstuebin wrote: It seems an easy way to tell someone how much you like the photo.
Not necessarily. They don't know that you've voted for it unless you put a "V" comment in. And that alone may tell them that you liked the photo, but not
why you liked the photo, which is much more important when getting a sense of what works and what doesn't. I'd rather leave a comment with some information about that.
kstuebin wrote:And I also look at the popular photos. Not the galleries though.
I rarely look at either, because...
kstuebin wrote:I've only recently realized that the voting system is flawed somehow. Because I do check it out, I see the top photos change almost daily but the ones in the middle tend to stay the same. I will see a really old top photo never leave and a brand new one shoot to the top in a matter of hours. How is the voting calculated? On some algorithm from another planet?
So I guess I'm beginning to rethink it because it actually seems pointless if people I vote for never seem to get anywhere even when other people have voted for them too.
I guess it isn't really a peer evaluated system but another Pbase glitchy programming error.
... it's not that the voting system is flawed, it's that some people are gaming it. Get a group of vote swapping buddies together ("you vote for mine, I'll vote for yours") and given that most photos will get only a handful of votes, it's pretty easy for a group of 8 to 12 people to vote each other up into the stratosphere. That's essentially how the brand new one that you refer to rockets up the chart. That's why I prefer to look at the Recents rather than the Populars; the Recents are also flawed (by people who constantly delete and reload photos), though you get to know those "frequent fliers" over time and can mentally filter out their galleries. (Though it'd be great if you could put them on a blacklist that would filter them out of your results.)
The PADs I'll look at only occasionally to pick up a bit of fresh meat, but for the most part I've given up on that list because there are so many non-PAD galleries which are flagged as PADs just to get them a bit of extra visibility.