Integrity of the site

[Quarry]

In the past weeks you've added a lot of pictures. In doing this you have impacted the rankings that you show on the site. To explain, previously Bar Refaeli and Natalia Velez were continually top rated and they showed up quite regularly in voting. As a result they have a large number of votes and their average rating won't go up or down much.

Now you've added so many more pictures that when a quality new girl comes up she may be rated high but because of the large volume of pictures she doesn't come up as a selection as often as she would have before. As a result, it will take much longer for a new picture to settle into her "proper" ranking. This problems grows the more you add pictures.

Where Bar was historically always at the top, she's now shown as the 69th best female picture. All pictures ahead of her are from the additions in the past weeks. To think that she can go from always being on top for months, to having so many pictures rated ahead of her is ridiculous.

Months ago when you added pictures, within a week the new pictures were voted on enough to move it to a reasonable level. Now, with the always increasing volume of pictures, new pictures won't move quickly at all. Quality new pictures will always be ranked high at first and push older pictures lower. It doesn't necessarily mean it's higher rated. Just new.

Old pictures won't move because they have many votes before you added so many new pictures and therefore their rating won't change much. New pictures won't move much because they don't come up as often due to there being so many more pictures. The ratings seem useless.

This seems ironic given that the site is "Hotness Rater" and now the ratings don't mean too much.

My interest has changed from trying to see which girl is rated high, to simply watching what pictures you add.

 

[HotnessRater]

Now you've added so many more pictures that when a quality new girl comes up she may be rated high but because of the large volume of pictures she doesn't come up as a selection as often as she would have before

If a girl has a high ranking, we will show them more often than a girl with a lower ranking. This isn't completely a function of how many pictures are available

Where Bar was historically always at the top, she's now shown as the 69th best female picture

Do you think that Bar should still be on top? Maybe she was only on the top due to a lack of better pictures...

Currently our top lists require that a picture has a certain number of votes within their range to qualify. It is possible that we need to increase that number. It's something we are looking at.

New pictures won't move much because they don't come up as often due to there being so many more pictures

Our queuing algorithm is quite complex and it gives preference to pictures that either have a low number of votes or are highly rated. We have been adjusting this algorithm. For a long time, if a picture lost their first couple of votes, they would have been pushed down the ranks and would not have shown up again unless people had their settings set to include the 1-7 range. These pictures just sat in an unrated state since they didn't have enough votes to be considered rated and their rating was too low to get a lot of new votes. We made a change to this algorithm so these pictures wouldn't fall as quickly in the rankings so they would be able to continue to be shown even with a few losses in order to give them a chance to rank. I think many of these "new" pictures that you are seeing have been in the system for a long time, it's just now they are getting their chance to get some votes. As a result of the new changes, new pictures don't fall off as quickly as they used to but that has a side effect of boosting the entire range of pictures so you are now seeing girls in the 9.75-9.9 range (which we didn't really see when Bar was always number one) As this backlog of pictures gets more votes, I think you will see the lesser quality pictures that are in that range will drop down and make that whole range more competitive and that should cause that range to drop and things should balance out more. We are watching it but it is kind of a slow process. Give it some time. I think you will see things adjust.

 

[HotnessRater]

Where Bar was historically always at the top, she's now shown as the 69th best female picture.

She is already back to 68th

 

[HotnessRater]

... and 61st today

 

[Quarry]

You can count down Bar's status all you want but you are helping to make the point. For the ratings to start to balance out all you need to do is slow down or stop adding as many pictures. You control it. Once you stop adding pictures then the ratings of those that you've recently added will start to go down, if they deserve to. This is what is happening. As you stated new pictures (ones with low votes), or highly rated pictures get preference so these girls should have increasingly more challenges. If they are trending down, this will return long term girls to the status they had, as we are seeing.

As a point, Bar Refaeli is now rated at 53, and I should highlight that I'm not stuck on always seeing her on top. When you click on her picture you she that she has been on enough challenges to result in 284 pages of challenges. There are roughly 12 challenges per page which means that she's been involved in about 3,400 challenges. Her average won't change significantly.

Of the 52 girls rated above her, only 6 girls have 10 to 12 pages of challenges, and all other girls (except one - see 38 below) have less than 9 pages. By far, most of the girls rated 1-52 have 3 or 4 pages of challenges (21 girls), which likely means that they are relatively new. They have low votes and are highly rated and as you state these girls will get preference, but they haven't created many votes yet, so they must be new.

Of all the girls in the top 60 only the following three have even been involved in challenges of more then 12 pages. That's a long time Anonymous girl at 38 (129 pages); and Natalia Velez at 59 and 60 (199 and 164 pages respectively).

As you stop adding pictures Bar (and other long term girls) will gain back their ranking. New girls will start really high (low votes; high ranking) but over time will likely settle lower, unless really high quality. The more girls you add the slower the transition. You've added so many that the transition that used to take a matter of days now takes longer. The transition is happening but by adding pictures the site will never reflect a proper rating.

Don't get me wrong I appreciate the pictures but it's not really a rating system that works over time. A count down of Bar's picture ranking isn't needed. Let's just enjoy what you're providing but don't call it rating. It's OK but only works to a degree.

 

[HotnessRater]

They have low votes and are highly rated and as you state these girls will get preference, but they haven't created many votes yet, so they must be new..

I think the point you are missing is these pictures might not all be new. The number of votes is not an indication of the age of the picture.

For example: http://hotnessrater.com/picture-details/102942/jennifer-lawrence was uploaded in 2013 and has been in our system longer than the Bar picture we are talking about but it only has had 43 match ups. Bar has had 3784 match ups. This was because Jennifer's picture had lost the first couple votes so her score got set too low and she was being only compared against the people that are rated 1-3 (and nobody sets their settings that low) so she just quit getting votes. A lot of the other pictures aren't necessarily new pictures. They are pictures that have been around a while and were never given a fair shot to get votes. With our algorithm changes, these old pictures are now NOT being cast down to a 1-3 just because they lost a couple battles. This has the side effect of bringing these older pictures to light for the first time.

Before we made the change, a girl like Jennifer Lawrence could lose a couple battles and then be clumped into a group with the 1-5 range and have a tough time to ever get out of it... especially because when she did get a vote, it could easily be against another model that was also wrongfully in the range and she could just lose again. This was making the lower end of the spectrum inaccurate. I think this has cleaned up the lower end a lot. Try setting your settings to 1-5 and you shouldn't see any more attractive women in that range (if you dare) where a couple months ago, you never knew what you would get. Now all these older pictures have bubbled up and have really stirred up the rating a lot... and it is taking some time to settle out.

Many of the pictures in our top 100 have been in the system for a while, they just didn't get a fair chance at votes. Now that they are getting their chance, we have a big backlog of pictures to rate and that is going to just take some time to settle out.

Now I do agree that it is possible for a new picture to go a hot winning streak and get rated higher than they should. Currently every picture has a rating, we just consider them "unrated" until they have a number of votes that we felt would be enough to say that their rating was accurate. We are considering raising the bar on when we show the rating to try and minimize "hot winnng streak" pictures from showing up in the lists until they have enough ratings to back it up... but it is a balancing act. If you raise it too high then everyone shows up as unrated which isn't helpful either. We are always looking for ways to improve the rating system.

A picture's rating is not just a function of wins vs loses. It is much more complicated than that. If a girl loses 50% of her votes, what would you expect her rating to be? Most people would just calculate it as Wins/(wins+loses) and give them a 5 rating. That obviously isn't accurate if all the pictures they were rated against were 9 or higher. We take the ratings of all the pictures they were compared against into consideration in our calculation.

 

[HotnessRater]

So right now the average number of votes per picture is 20.7479

We would like to see that number increase. I will report what it is in a few day. If that number continues to rise, it means that the rate of voting is outpacing the rate of new pictures added. That is what we want to see.

If that average falls, that would mean that you have a real legitimate concern and we would have to limit new picture additions.

 

[HotnessRater]

The average number of votes per picture is slowly climbing... we are at 20.8768 now

And that number is a lot misleading because it takes in account the average of all the pictures across the system even if they aren't eligible for votes on HotnessRater.... meaning the BabesRater pictures aren't filtered out before I came up with that average when they really should be since they all have zero HotnessRater votes.

I will try and get some more accurate numbers

 

[HotnessRater]

so although Bar dropped to 9.73, she is back in our top 10!

I kind of thought we just needed some time for things to work themselves out

 

[mag]

I hate to be a bearer of bad news but Bar might not be getting the votes because others don't think as highly as some others do. I am one of those and have actually picked others above her.

 

[HotnessRater]

Well the issue wasn't that she wasn't getting votes. The number of votes really didn't change. She was dominating but the way the algorithm used to work, she wasn't getting queued up for more votes. I made some modifications to the algorithm that calculated the rating and the rating of a bunch of other pictures jumped and knocked her down on the list. Whenever we change the algorithms, a lot of stuff changes and sometimes has unforeseen effects which requires us to make more changes. For a little while things were a little chaotic but I think they have settled down now. Part of the problem was a lot of new pictures came in and the queuing algorithm put them up against each other and the best pictures of the newer ones were scoring higher than some of the older pictures that people thought were better pictures... and the way we queued them up, they were not really being compared with the older pictures, just with each other so there definitely were some issues.

Then later, the way the queue worked, pictures with multiple people or no face could get a lot less votes than other pictures and get stuck in first place just because they weren't getting voted on any more. The Casie Kimball picture that is in first place now is a multiple person picture but it is still getting votes so it could potentially fall if people start voting against her. A month ago, the odds of her getting queued would have been much lower since she is a multiple person picture that is already rated. We had a few people get upset with us while we were working out the kinks...

A few iterations later, I think we have that all worked out now... however we might find other reasons to change things again, but so far I think the latest changes have solved our issues

 

[HotnessRater]

Bar has worked her way back into the Top 10 by the way