There's a related ticket here - I suggest you add to it :)

http://trac.zooomr.com/trac/ticket/168

Awesomeness does seem a little off recently. I've got some recent photos with quite a few favs much lower than they should be.

mine aren't making a lot of sense either.

I've got a picture with only 16 views in about a year rated above a picture with 24 views in the last week. The one with 16 views has no comments or favorites.

I think I've definitely found a bug. In my Last week Discover view of my pictures, I see picture #1, #2, #3, and #4. In my last month I see #1, #2b, #3, and #4, where #2b is an older picture that was rated higher. But #2 is nowhere to be found even though it appeared before #3 and #4 in the last week view. It looks like #2b just replaced it instead of moving it down.

I noticed this bug doesn't seem to be in Smart Sets. I just created one, and a picture leapfrogged ahead of another one that was supposedly more "awesome" in the photostream. What gives, Kris?

I have to say that I don't think awesomness ever worked that well. I think this is a case of over engineering. Kris has tried to make it too smart. If it just calculated awesomeness on favourites and views it would be much simpler and also make alot more sense.

Awesomeness works how awesomeness works.

There are 28 different ways we calculate the score. But keep this in mind -- you are always fighting against yourself, not other users.

kristopher

Could you tell us what the 28 different ways are Kris?

If Awesomeness is working as expected, you need to change it. I've got a floppy disc picture with 9 overall views and 1 fave at the top of my pictures when sorted by awesomeness - that's ranked above shots with 47 views / 4 faves and 31 views / 4 faves. Even if all the views and fave happened on the day of upload for that floppy shot, it's still less awesome than those other two IMO.

"Awesomeness" seems to have improved in recent days. Pictures that did not change for a while are now moving around in the awesomeness order.

i noticed that in the past week or two (coincidentally around the time of many of the above posts) a number of my lesser shots jumped around a lot from day to day. it's my assumption that someone has been tinkering with the algorithm. while my shots are roughly in order of popularity, the order still doesn't make perfect sense.

i considered feeding my top 100 into a spreadsheet to reverse engineer the algorithm...but, honestly, i don't care enough to generate a 28-degree polynomial. that and it's not my job to troubleshoot this site.

i'm just happy that the site has stayed up for an entire day.

Awesomeness is definitely less awesome than it used to be. Maybe it's only broken for pictures that were uploaded during the period where views weren't being counted.

...discovered an unexpected wrinkle in the mystery:
i have several shots i took for work that i've kept private from the instant they were uploaded a couple weeks ago (never been fav'd, commented, or even viewed). yet they rank, scattered about, around my 1/3 level of awesomeness...above photos that are both older and newer and that have been viewed many times; even above one or two that had comments. that's awesome!

same case here metrognome.

I don't want to go into the awesomeness algorithm a whole lot, but basically, because you're fighting yourself, if you're usually getting 4 faves on each of your photos, it's going to take about 8 or more faves to push it into Discover.

I'm going to look to see if there are any other problems with awesomeness. Just so you know, a new photo's awesomeness is based on your own scores. You need to always try to do better than your last shot :)

kristopher

Moved from Zipline posts:
"Right now the 20 Last Day photos: 13 are from 1 person, 4 from another person, 2 from a 3rd and 1 more. More than 4 people have upload in last 24hrs"

"100 Last Day has similar pattern: lots of photos by a few people. Some variety would be good. Doesn't have to be a popularity contest, just variety."

I don't care about my photos, but I'd like to truly discover more. The same person shouldn't have more than 1 picture on the main Discover page. There are enough Zooomrs to have a lot of variety in the Last Hour, Last Day, and Last Week categories.

But what about what seems like a fundamental flaw with views and faves? Once again, I've got a picture with more faves and views than the others ranked above it, and view-based smartsets are still not working.

Kristopher, but the photos currently in the 'last day' top 20 have no faves, and 2 views, 6 views, etc. Sometimes 10 or more are from the same user. That doesn't make sense to me. It seems to just be like the raw feed of 'last hour' instead.

It seems to be very off, and not at all representative of the good stuff I know is getting posted, from new users, old users, whatever.

Celine and friends -- it looks like there was a bug. I fixed it, let's see where it takes us.

kristopher

I also agree with Celine - Discover is telling me the majority of the best stuff uploaded to Zooomr in the past day is snapshots of a baby, when I clearly see better stuff in my Zipline. It just makes me wonder how much stuff I'm missing.

Looks like it's working now -- yay! :)

kristopher

It does look better. Thanks for fixing it, Kristopher.

The Last Day still seems a bit wonky.

also in my opinion is not working...
i see that a foto voted with 2 faves are in a bad position respectly one without fave... is strange...

Kris: thanks for shedding a little more light on awesomeness. but (there's always a "but"), i had some thoughts for everyone's consideration:

1) the self-improvement aspect of awesomeness is not stated, implied, or intuitive. i would guess that nobody realized that this was the nature of awesomeness until you wrote it. maybe i missed it when i signed up but i didn't know this. might a name-change or prominent description be in order?

2) due to the fact that digital cameras (and digital scans...and image software) have been around for a considerably longer time than Zooomr, just about everyone has a huge backlog of images when they join. when these are uploaded, this inherently and permanently skews awesomeness, does it not? maybe over time, it's not a big deal but, on face value, it seems the entire function is corrupted by this reality.

3) to me, the above posts indicate that users are interested in a pure popularity-sort method. i would imagine that this could be accomplished through sets but would it be a major undertaking to develop another widget to reside next to awesomeness? maybe i'm wrong and it's not needed but if it's an easy addition, why not?...just a thought.

the problem is that awesomeness is based also on number of views. Old image have a big number of views and new photo that is more beautifull (and that have more faves) are not in the best of.

number of viewer have to be balanced with date of upload...

[sorry for my bad english]

Not sure how much number of views effects it. My most "awesome" shot has been:
marked private for at least 6 months
viewed more times by 335 of my pictures (30 or 40 have been viewed less.
Has been faved once only.

This compares with my most viewed image with 10 times the number of viewings and around 33 favs.

The first was put up in April last year compared to the second in June of last year so not a huge variation in time.

At this moment, all but five of the top 20 in 'last day' are by the same person. I think perhaps limiting the number a single person have in the last day view would be a good idea. The person in question has nice photos, but I personally don't think any one person should dominate any single section of Discover. That defeats the purpose, in my opinion.

Is it because they're new? Or does it have to do with the number of images one uploads at a time?

Also, I've heard a theory that the number of keywords might affect placement in Discover and/or awesomeness. Is this true? If so, that seems like an odd way to measure things.