I wrote about my concerns in a few forum posts but always used to be “careful” in criticizing.
I just didn’t want to badmouth before having results.
The purge remains until almost 3 months now. What are the consequences?
JED’s aim.
The JED team has started changing things which were highly necessary for some matters. E.g. the removal of silent votes.
As the JED is intended for people who want to find the appropriate extensions for their projects and users have the opportunity of voting for extensions the correct conclusion is that the best rated extension of a category shall be ranked at first place followed by the lower rated extensions.
Certainly it does not mean that the highest ranked extension meets the taste of all users but it gives a clear hint about the quality.
About ratings and numbers.
Two extensions! Both have an average rating of 4.83 . One has 400 votes the other has 10.
If I am looking for an extension I’d decide first testing the one with 400 votes.
And why?
Because of the law of large numbers!
If you reduce the number of votes the average differs more and more form the expected value!Wikipedia wrote:“The law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times. According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value, and will tend to become closer as more trials are performed.”
The purge is counterproductive for the community of users who want just like to see the most valuable extensions ranked first.
Thereby it doesn’t matter if the votes are “outdated” or don’t reflect the current state.
Someone came to the conclusion that an extension is useful or not and commented his opinion about the quality of this extension by a rating and review.
Actually it is really unfair to this user to skip his opinion about the quality of an extension.
The greater the number of votes, the more the average rating reflects the real (expected) quality.
This is not fortunetelling it is pure math and stochastic.
Future prospects.
As there are more than 10k extensions on JED it became harder to achieve reviews as it already used to be. Even for established extensions it is almost impossible to get 5 votes per month. Ones can be happy if getting 2-3 reviews each month.
If the new “system” comes and the first and last 2% don’t count, plus all 2+ years old votes are skipped and the older votes won’t count the same as new votes JED will come to a certain point of being useless.
The point is when a big part of extensions fall under the 5 vote’s threshold or just a handful of votes are determining the quality of an extension.
MY conclusion:
If I am going through JED I see many developers who stopped caring about their extensions.
If I am talking to developers I just hear complaints that they have lost 50% of their votes.
Some of them up to 80%. I hear a voice of being not satisfied, very unhappy or de-motivated.
I see that the fraudulent actions are rising because whales got small fishes and some piranhas see their chance. Etc.
It was a promising approach but I must sadly say that IMHO the purge wasn’t a good idea.
I didn’t want to use the word “failure” - this would be also de-motivating to the JED members whose work I much appreciate and I think despite this decision they are doing a great job.
