Quick question about findka, Is the idea to only upvote/downvote things you have actually experienced and liked or dislike, or do you also upvote/downvote things you don't know but like or dislike?
I would think the first case would result in way better data (which is why (I think) last.fm recommendation system is so good), but the latter case seems to be the natural thing to do, humans love to judge shit without actually engaging with stuff.
Mainly the former. Ideally you've experienced the things you've rated, but in many cases you can probably judge fairly accurately if you're interested in something based on a short description.
That brings up a key point which I'm not sure is clear to users or not: voting on items specifically means "this is/is not a good recommendation for me". It's not a judgment on the goodness of the item in general. So if findka showed me e.g. an article on pottery that looked high quality, I'd probably still downvote it since I'm not into pottery.
I think that is not really communicated in the current design, reminds me of the ratings on Netflix where they are intended as "Our estimation of this contents rating for you based on your viewing history" while most people I talked about it just thought it was the rating of the thing in itself.
Good to know, any suggestions for making it clearer? Maybe thumbs up/down is the wrong labeling; perhaps something like "show me more like this" and "not interested"... though I have no idea what icons I would use for that.
I would think the first case would result in way better data (which is why (I think) last.fm recommendation system is so good), but the latter case seems to be the natural thing to do, humans love to judge shit without actually engaging with stuff.