> If the votes are averaging around eight, why should it end up
> overall at 6.24? Seems odd.
I thought so too at first. It is a relative score compared to other stories being posted. If I understand the explanation below then if half of stories posted have all "10"s and the other half of stories have all "8"s, then if your story has all "9"s it will have an overall score of 6.00. Make sense?
"The Score calculated relative to the median of the scores of all the stories posted during the same period of time. For more info, check the site's help page on the issue."
From Help Page:
The system calculates a story's raw average vote after dropping the top 5% and the bottom 5% of the votes to eliminate outliers.
The system knows all the stories raw scores and knows the median of these raw scores.
The score weighing formula figures where the story's raw score sits between this median and the extremes of 1 and 10. Then it calculates the same relative location for a median of 6.00. So if a story's raw score is equal to the raw scores median, it will end up with a score of 6. if it has a perfect 10 score, it remains at 10. If it has a raw score of 1, then it stays at 1. Stories with raw scores closest to the raw median are moved the most on the scale. Stories closer to the extremes are moved less. The raw scores median is calculated twice per day.
The weighed score gets used as the story's score for display on the site.
This weighing algorithm preserves the relative order of the stories. So if you sort the stories by raw score and by weighed score, you'll get the exact same line up of stories.
To put it simply, the score weighing algorithm shifts scores to create an artificial median of 6.00.