How should we compute post scores?

I tried, but my little one hit “save” before it was ready. I then edited the for a few hours, creating 39 examples total, with a comparison between how the two methods rank those items. When I hit save, Discourse popped up a generic error message and lost all that work. I doubt there is a way to get it back.

I’ll summarize what you would have seen. The Wilson score is a prediction of how likely a vote is to be an upvote, based on the votes so far, so it comes out as number between 0 and 1, exclusive. The ratio of upvotes to downvotes is the most important factor, but it will give a little higher score for 20:10 than 10:5 because more data means more confidence.

The Stack Exchange ranking tends to put items with a lot of votes at the extremes, either at the top or the bottom of the list. This is most notable when there are about double one kind of vote than the other. SE treats 100:50 as ten times better than 10:5, while Wilson scoring treats them almost identically (66.23% to 63.16%).

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