- Edited
TheMuffinMan you can find the explanation of the scoring here: https://docs.botto.com/details/voting-mechanism
tl;dr is that pieces are given a score out of 100 based on voting, 80% of the time higher scores are shown and 20% lower scores are. new fragments are given a default score of 100 until they are viewed 100 times to ensure they are seen and have a fair sample from which to be given a fair score.
What this unfortunately means is that our leaderboard isn’t actually a selection of the most desirable pieces but rather a representation of which pieces were lucky enough to be shown more frequently to Bottonians that spend more votes during the first portion of the voting cycles.
This ^ isn't quite right. Based on the scoring mechanism, new pieces are actually guaranteed to get viewed 100 times at the beginning of the round. But, it is true the early voters have significant influence on that critical early momentum, which actually conflicts with your reasoning that people don't have enough incentive to vote early in the round.
Culling formula
I disagree with removing fragments that haven't made it to the leaderboard as this goes against your own reasoning of the leaderboards not currently being representative.
@choobie's proposal to remove by VP I think makes more sense to me, but does need some mitigation so as to normalize across rounds.
Instead can retroactively remove bottom 75% based on votes cast just in the last round.
We could adapt this if the feeling is that the voting is already too skewed and we'd lose some favorable pieces (though this leaves 1600+ fragments, so feel like there's plenty). For instance, apply the 75% cut to round 10, then from there only have remove bottom 75% of fragments created that round up to present round.
Then going forward can remove bottom 350 of each individual round (equates to bottom 20%)
Scoring formula
As for adapting the scoring to determine what gets shown, I think it's too early to say. The views are too divergent here: one rationale is that there's a lot of junk in the new set that get in the way of promising pieces from previous rounds, the other is that newer is presumably better. I tend to agree with there being a lot of random stuff in each new set (along with promising stuff) and it wouldn't be bad for them to be sorted more quickly so that other pieces have a chance at catching early momentum in the round. But there needs more discussion and doesn't need to be included in this proposal.
Generally agree that more voting is going to help everything, and could help draw attention to the influence of voting earlier in the round.