Rating mechanisms. Sad experiences and optimistic conclusions.

Humanity has always followed the path of social inequality. Someone was better, someone worse by certain criteria. Someone was in power chosen, appointed or seized this power, arranging revolutions and building new societies. All this is successfully transferred to the network. Sites are created, administrators assign themselves moderators, and users vote, measured by “karma”. For them, "karma" (rating, popularity - as you like) is a sign of superiority.

I want to tell you about the experience that I received as the creator of a regional portal for creative people.

Two years ago, thinking about the mechanisms for rating users, I came up with the following scheme:
- Initially, user rating is 0;
- a user with a zero rating can give a mark of 10 points to the work he likes;
- the rating of works is summed up and the user rating is calculated
- when a certain rating is reached, the user can rate the work from 10 up to 50 points.
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What did I try to achieve in this way? Weed out inactive users who are registered but do not post work, they will never earn a high enough rating in order to somehow have a significant impact on the rating of works and avoid cheating. I naively believed that any work would receive a rating from 10 to 50 from each user. In practice, however, it turned out that the user in most cases voted for the maximum or did not vote at all. In addition, personal sympathies were unrealistically winding up the rating as a result, someone was on horseback and someone was an outsider, and both of them were not bad for their work.

I had to change the voting system.

Since the site was creative, it was decided to make several scales for the evaluation of work: creativity (originality), artistry, technology. For each of the scales it was possible to set a rating from 0 to 100. There were the following principles:
- each assessment had a weight;
- the more work the user has and the more reting of these works, the greater the weight of user ratings;
- weight ratings of the user with a zero rating - zero.
This system showed itself better and at first seemed like a panacea. But the following situation arose: users began to perceive ratings below 50 on any of the scales as an unreasonable understatement, and even had to enter a clause in the site’s rules that obliged them to comment on their low ratings (I’ll make a reservation for clarity - the author knew who gave what grade, maybe it was cause of this situation). In addition, many complained that it is very difficult to choose how much to deliver: 88 or 92, too much run-up. In addition - there were works that had a zero rating but were not bad - they simply did not vote for them, although other works were worse than them, but they had a rating, although low.

Now, for subjective reasons, it is not possible to introduce a new voting system, but a new site is being prepared for release (which I hope to present in the future on Habré (I hope for SuperGabra :))) and I want to take into account past mistakes:
- Do not let users see who and how to evaluate them;
- do not force the user to think;
- “if there is heaven then there is hell,” give the opportunity to minus the work.

One question remains, is the system -1 / + 1 so good?