Really beautiful product, but the way I see it there is a fundamental issue with the ranking (please correct me if I'm wrong): You are mixing up correlation and causation. It isn't ranking influential Product Hunters, but rather "Product Hunters with mainstream taste that tend to vote early in the day" (favoring European users that log on before lunch).
Am I missing something? If not, how will you deal with this issue?
@kjemperud thx for your valuable input! of course, European users have a better chance to receive a bigger score - but this is something we can't address on our own since we're more or less bound to the timezone ph is using.
we started the project one and a half week ago and tested 3 different approaches and found the current to be the best. what formula or criteria would you prefer?
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@kjemperud That was my first thought - that you'd be winning the leader board unless I stayed up till midnight to hit the first couple of links.
@jollife I don't have the answer to how you should do it. It's a challenge, and might require some more advanced weighting of various variables, such as who else upvotes the same products, and their typical influence. This would not be easy to get right, but currently the scores are rather meaningless (other than for identifying mainstream European users). But I'm guessing this is a side project, so might not be worth dealing with.
Again, beautiful product. I especially like the comparison tool :)
@kjemperud yes, it started as a small side project, but our aim was a leaderboard, which everyone can really use. we will tweak the underlying formula over time, so please check back in couple of days!
hi @rrhoover. thx for your kind words! We've seen HunterData in the past and wanted to create an even better ranking.
How? Well, we incorporate two basic principles in the rating:
1. a user who votes early should always get a higher score as all subsequent voters
2. a user who votes on every single product should be slowed down by the algorithm. so we defined that votes for unpopular hunts decrease your rank.
another important feature for us is the ability to compare two ore more hunters against each other (see: https://uberhunters.com/all/rrho...). We loved to implement this feature, as @neuling2k and I tend to battle against each others all the time! :)
@rrhoover@jollife I'm not sure how much I like that votes on unpopular hunts hurt your ranking. Or maybe I use PH differently, but just because something is popular doesn't mean that it's good. I'm curious — if I went back and voted for all the top 3 most hunted items every day, would my score go up?
@rrhoover@jollife@dshan this is basically what @golocalapps is saying below. It's really hard to judge a product by name and tagline alone, and yet I'm guessing many people do. There are several different *types* of PH hunters that are useful: the original posters, the upvoters, and the commentators. There are some overlap between them, but it'd be interesting to see who are the most influential in those categories, rather than a universal metric based on who votes with the majority.
@rrhoover@chrismessina hi chris, that depends on the timing of your vote. if you vote for the top 3, when they all have little to no votes, than it would be great for your score. if you vote on the end of the day, where your vote is one of the last, than your score will not profit that much.
Very well done, @neuling2k and @jollife! HunterData, a leaderboard of product hunters, was one of the first (maybe THE first) community built product by @yvoschaap a year ago.
Truth is, the aggregate number of upvotes presented for each product isn't the best indication of influence or a "good hunt" because it doesn't account for the number of people that saw the product (our traffic has significantly grown over time and time of day can make a difference) or non-credible upvotes (from voting rings, for example). That said, this is a good first step.
P.S. I shared some data from 2014, including some of the "top hunters" based on a weighted average of the number of upvotes they received from posts made.
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Great, now encouraging even more obsessive PH behavior.
I actually vote less now than I used to. Not sure why.
@jollife I'm actually not sure. I still visit at least once a day, check out several links and comment. But maybe I'm more picky about the upvote, and the daily system doesn't work well for looking something up after the fact.
Now that I think about it, I think I want to upvote (reward) good projects that don't just look good on the landing page, but also follow through. And you don't often get that on first look. You need to use the product, interact with the company and more. Upvoting works for reddit better because its based on the thing you see - picture, link, comment, etc - whereas on PH you're getting a product or business that takes use to get a feel for it.
For example, we've seen several newsletter generating and distribution companies and projects. So some good ideas, but really the question is how well do they actually work. So for that you need to sign up, add a list, make a newsletter, send it out and check results. So figure at least a couple of days if not a week or more. So do I upvote it prior to using it as a sign of "good idea" or do I wait to see if it works?
Being a maker myself, I had people not only signup for our startupbookbuzz.com email list, but upvoted it before they'd received a single email. I could have been sending book recommendations for Dr Seuss books (granted I could probably make a good case for using Green Eggs and Ham as a perfect startup analogy), but still people upvoted based on the concept, not on the execution.
Sometimes the idea is very cool and should get recognized for it. But I think I'm using it more for a bookmark than anything else now.
I would love to see leaderboards by geographies.
I work mostly with startups and I often refer them to submit it on PH. Majority of them in Europe/UK are not aware of (or not yet in the habit of) PH. So listing leaders by regions will be a fair logic!
@rrhoover, This idea is another example of PH being a perfect fit as a 'Habit Forming Product' as Nir often says! :)
@rrhhover again, in PH, I would love to see an profile badge option for PH contributors that we can use (embed code) on our websites. For instance what @getmoreclarity provides. Any such plans?
@rrhoover@rrhhover@getmoreclarity@vingar leaderboards by geographies would totally rock. for us it's a little bit difficult, because we have no realy geographic information we can extract (neither from producthunt nor from the twitter profiles itself)
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@rrhoover@jollife I understand, but I would love to see someone making it possible! :)
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@jollife what next you plan to have? I would love to see a 'Wishlist' where @ProductHunt contributors can write their top 1 wish they want to see in PH and others can vote on the wishes! :)
hi @vingar! we're in the middle of the evaluation of new features for @uberhunters. we definitely want to add a simple twitterbot, who is able to tweet to
a) uberhunter of the day,
b) a uberhunter who enters the top 10 overall,
c) a maker of a product, if a top 10 overall uberhunter votes for his product
this is not that big of a deal on a technical perspective, but we want to assure, that the feature is not too spammy at all. so we might end up tuning the mentioned levels over time.
ad "wishlist":
would you like to see this as another, stand alone product?
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@uberhunters@jollife I dont think 'wishlist' fits in the current uberhunter model unless you are also planning some add-on. So, yes a different product! :)
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