[Catalog-sig] Please turn off ratings

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Jacob Kaplan-Moss <jacob at jacobian.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:42 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>> To put some objective data into the discussion: here is the number of
>> ratings that got posted recently, by month:
>>
>>  2010 |  9 |    41
>>  2010 | 10 |    51
>>  2010 | 11 |    42
>>  2010 | 12 |    51
>>  2011 |  1 |    76
>>  2011 |  2 |    71
>>  2011 |  3 |    47
>
> Thank you.
>
> Here are some more numbers: I took a look [1] at how many ratings
> packages have received. Here's the distribution (# of ratings: # of
> packages):
>
> 0: 13452
> 1: 427
> 2: 91
> 3: 22
> 4: 12
> 5: 10
> 6: 3
> 7: 8
> 8: 4
> 9: 2
> 10: 1
> 11: 2
> 13: 1
> 21: 1
>
> So 96% of packages have no ratings. Only 1% have more than one rating.
>
> I ask again, how is this useful?
>
> Django, with 7 ratings, is in the 99.9th percentile among all
> packages, so if anyone could find this useful I suppose it might be
> me. But 7 ratings isn't in any way a significant sample: PyPI shows
> 11,000 downloads of Django 1.3 alone (which is just a few weeks old);
> there's no *way* this provides *any* useful data whatsoever.

It seems to me that, given we're quite a long way into the potential
user adoption of this feature, it's simply not being used. I would
support removing it, as it seems that the only purpose it serves is to
antagonise. And we could all be doing far more interesting things.


     Richard