How should we compute post scores?

[elendiastarman]

@celtschk

And that’s what I don’t understand: Why should our certainty relate to the number of votes in this form?

Note that my one-liner does not contain any formula; it contains concepts. If you want to know why the concepts lead to the formula, you can look into Wikipedia. But the concept itself is clear: If we want a good approximation to the real value, we better are in the region where the real value is most likely to be found. And being right in the middle of it is likely not a bad bet.

I don’t see the concept behind the Steam formula.

I must admit I don’t understand your question. If I rephrase my liner to focus entirely on concepts, then it’s literally just “the more votes a post has, the more certain we are that we know it’s true value”, which is exactly the same thing as the centered Wilson score. It is true that you make no mention of the size of “the region where the real value is most likely to be found”, which is the ‘confidence’ part, but it shows up in the formula nonetheless. (And in your original one-liner, where you imply a 95% confidence interval.) The formula you advocate also incorporates total votes (dividing by up+down+4), which is why I’m confused by your remarks on the SteamDB formula incorporating the number of votes into the level of certainty.