Sorting A List Of Songs By Popularity

Question

For student council this year, I\'m on the \"songs\" committee, we pick the songs. Unfortunately, the kids at the dances always end up hating some of the stupid song choices. I

Answer 1

That's a very good question. There are a few similar questions that have been asked here.

This article is probably a good place to start. Apparently upvotes minus downvotes is a bad way to do it. The better way is to use complicated maths to assign a score to each and sort by that.

Here is a scoring function in Ruby from the article:

require 'statistics2'

def ci_lower_bound(pos, n, power)
    if n == 0
        return 0
    end
    z = Statistics2.pnormaldist(1-power/2)
    phat = 1.0*pos/n
    (phat + z*z/(2*n) - z * Math.sqrt((phat*(1-phat)+z*z/(4*n))/n))/(1+z*z/n)
end

pos is the number of positive rating, n is the total number of ratings, and power refers to the statistical power: pick 0.10 to have a 95% chance that your lower bound is correct, 0.05 to have a 97.5% chance, etc.

As a usability thing, I would sort the data by the score, but I would not show the score to the user. I would only show the number of upvotes and downvotes.

Answer 2

How about sorting songs by posting time or number of votes (negative + positive)? If your goal is to give every song equal attention, this sounds good enough.