This thread has been inactive for a while. Here is what I understand the current proposal to be. If there is no contrary feedback, I’ll add it to the functional spec in 48 hours.
- For each answer we display raw upvotes and downvotes. This makes controversy visible.
- For each answer we compute a score thus: (upvotes + bonus + N) / (upvotes + downvotes + bonus + 2N). Scores are not directly displayed. Default N is 1 but is configurable per-site.
- We order answers by score, with newer answers winning ties.
- For questions older than (default) 6 months, new answers are labeled “new” and given a bonus in the scoring formula for the first (default) 7 days. This allows new answers to have more visibility when there are high-scoring answers present already. The amount of the bonus is TBD. All values are configurable per-site, including turning this feature off.
- (Early, but not required for MVP): a user, after voting, can choose to make that vote public. People viewing the answer can see that there were N public upvotes and M public downvotes, take some action to see who they came from, and decide how to weigh those people’s opinions.
There could be other uses of the scoring bonus in the future.