Associated Content's Three Star Article Ratings Help Writers in the Long Run

As a newcomer to Associated Content I was curious about how important it was to rate other peoples' articles. There are five stars and votes are calculated immediately after you rate the articles. After publishing some content while learning the ropes, I realized every article is rated 3/5. I presumed the initial rating is by the official who reviewed your content after it was submitted.

Two days passed and I kept seeing the same results - everyone was voted three stars out of five. There were some articles even in CPs within the top 1000 that had articles with three star ratings. It occurred to me that three stars is the default voting scale.

I voted on my own articles. Come on people, who doesn't do it? But I do it as an experiment so I can calculate how many people rated the article so far - and estimate how many times the page has been viewed.

If I have a three star rating and after I rate it a five, and I end up getting 4/5 overall, it means only me and AC voted so far. The first vote belongs either to the person who reviewed your article for publication or the lifeless computerized feature that will vote all articles 3/5. I can estimate that only two views from CPs on AC have been made.

Now it sounds like I don't like the feature. That's what everyone thinks about it too but the more you critically analyze the system - the more you discover how amazing it is.

If every article in the world began without a rating, as in the first reader gets to decide with one vote where it will start. That is a choice given to the average reader online and most will rate either 5 stars or none. It's just the way the world goes and we've seen it all the time in websites and forums. On IMDB for example, the administrators know the star ratings new movies receive upon release are almost completely unreliable.

People are either going to vote ten if they liked it or moderately liked it, without thinking of possible flaws. People who didn't like the movie a little bit will simply rate it a number below five. Even intelligent people who want to rate the movie with truth will rate it a higher number than he would've voted for to "balance" the vote. We've all done it without realizing it.

So how do you solve something like this? How do return balance when there was never any balance to begin with?

By voting every article 3/5, Associated Content can separate what articles is high quality or low quality. Articles that remain with the 3/5 rating probably have never been read but articles with numbers in the 4's and above are especially distinguished. Look around in the library of content in AC and it's harder to find articles above four stars than it is to find them at three stars. Articles with ratings that are not integers (ex. 3.5, 3.75, 4.5) are even more worth reading because it means many readers have read and took the time to vote.

AC gives us the power to use the system as a way of estimating how many viewed our articles, how to quickly find the best information for a question you have, and create competition amongst articles for the high quality spot. This isn't a world where you want millions of articles all rated 1/5 or 5/5 and barely anything in between. This is a world starting all articles from the AVERAGE spot of 3/5 (the C grade most us are neutral about) because it is the only way to find:

-Many articles with 3/5 ratings.

-Rare articles with 4/5 ratings.

-Distinguished articles (only if the CP is highly viewed) with 4.5-5/5 ratings. These are to see which are the best of the Associated Content community.

The variable here is view count but over the span of all the CPs present and how articles make it to the top, we can find the star rating system more reliable if we work at rating everyone's articles. The benefits come to us, the Content Producers. We wait all day for an update on our view count and the process can be addicting. The reason it helps us more is:

-If the common polite rule was to always rate each other's article, then everyone can accurately estimate their articles' view count without doubting its reliability. This is good if you don't want to wait a week to see how your performance has been.

-The rule of thumb rating is 4/5 if the article is well written and 3/5 if it's too average. 5/5 ratings should be used as a rarity. This is a standard hard to apply to an entire demographic but over time the best of the best rise to the top. Not only does this help us, it also helps Associated Content give newcomers a good understand of the way the system works.

Associated Content is always getting new readers and writers so standards must be raised and the community has to be friendly to aspiring people all over the world.

It truly is a user generated world, a world all about content. The writers have to help each other become better through constructive criticism and friendly advice. It's cool to vote 5/5 stars for a friend who needs a boost, but never spam and overdo it. If we want our articles to stand out from the 3/5's, then we need to understand Associated Content's rating system and use it to get more views for our articles and where we measure up our skills.