No more image ratings

We've removed image ratings from the site. From now on, the number of favorites will be used to rank images against each other instead.

This means that instead of seeing "Most Highly Rated" on the front page, you'll now see "Most Favorited Today", which is a list of the images that have gotten the most new favorites in the past day. One of the benefits of Most Highly Rated on the front page was that the list would change from one day to the next as images on the list received a few scores of 0 and dropped off; we expect Most Favorited Today to do the same thing as images on it reach a saturation point in the number of favorites they receive and drop off the list. In addition, in the main gallery, you can see the best images (i.e., the ones that have gotten the most favorites) from the past week. You can also see the best (most favorited) images of all time, as before.

On user profile pages, there are two new metrics. One is "total favorites received", which correlates with the number of uploads the user has, and the other is "average favorites per upload", which gives the average number of favorites the user has received per uploaded image. This latter metric doesn't count images uploaded in the past day so as to not penalize uploaders for new images that haven't been favorited yet. You can also sort the memberlist by these metrics.

We expect the removal of ratings to have the following benefits:

• No more disproportionate negative impact from "zero-bombers", who took advantage of the fact that most images had ratings of 8.5+ and so a vote of 0 would bring the average down more than a vote of 10 would bring it up.
• Having both ratings and favorites was redundant. Often, people would favorite an image (indicating they liked it) but not leave a rating, or vice versa. There will now be one single metric we can use to measure how "liked" an image is.
• Ratings were noisy. There were some users who seemed to give low or high ratings seemingly at random, which would combine with the disproportionate impact of 0 ratings to produce unwanted variability.
• Favorites are more positive towards women who visit and see their pictures on the site. No one wants to see that they've been given low ratings. Ratings were supposed to be a grade for the images and their quality, but could at times feel like it was the women themselves who were being graded on a scale from 0 to 10, which is not the message we want to send.

Update: There is now a '+1' option under every image. This has the effect of increasing an image's score by 1 (just like adding to favorites) without actually adding it to your favorites list. This means you can vote on images without worrying about cluttering your favorites.

Seems reasonable!  Ratings were always a matter of deciding whether to vote honestly or to try and game it to nudge it in your preferred direction, and the average ratings were too clustered around 8.5 - 9.5 for the scale to be that useful.  The one suggestion I would make is that it would be nice if there were a "most favorited" option for a time scale between last week and all time, like either last month or year.  (On a side note, I've never really seen the point of the "highest resolution" search; the only reason I can think of is for finding old magazine scans, but it seems like the "classic" tag would take care of that)

Excellent decision. This is a great way of making this site more about appreciation and less about our (frankly irrelevant) opinions and holy wars based on them.

Great! I wrote some years ago the rating is unwanted here and don't believe you did this.

Now there is more place for additional tags such as crossfit, brazilian etc.

I always voted for the individual photo - clarity, composition, the model, etc., but I thoroughly approve the removal of scoring. It's like a breath of fresh air. Good move! :)

I think it's a good idea. It makes no sense to have two different ways of valuing photos.

I just hope that the greater amount of favorites is for the really best photos, i.e which have better muscles.

We will have to wait a while to see if it works really well.

First off, let me say I have some sympathy with Chainer's decision to abolish the 0-10 rating system, as I've been one of the noisiest complainers about zero-bombing (and its cousin, 10-bombing) and mischief-voting in general for quite some time. I will still miss the rating system, though, because of the interactiveness it brought to the site. I always used 'fave-ing' as a way of 'turning it up to 11': fave-ing the very best of the 10s.

This new system is restrictively binary (kind of like the Yes/No in moderation), and makes it impossible to register the fact that you like a pic ... just not quite enough to fave it. It seems based on the idea that all non-faved pix are equal ... and they're not.

I very rarely handed out a score of less than 7, but there was still plenty of scope for indicating different degrees of approval. In a way, it makes GWM less fun ... but considering how some members chose to have THEIR fun, I guess it was inevitable.

Shame, though ...

I think that ultimately the only way to keep this site relatively "pure," for female muscle and within the limits allowed by Chainer, is to aggressively monitor the Moderate button. I just voted on about 70 pictures, at least a third I voted 'No' on due to lack of muscle. It's both amazing; and sad; the amount of "cheesecake" that some guys are trying to upload here.

I deleted some off-topic comments here about the women on the site not being muscular enough, which belong in a different thread.

Currently the favorites in the last month or year can't be done because I only started keeping track of favorite dates/times in the past few weeks. Even once it becomes feasible, it would be very computationally intensive and thus require additional work.

The "highest resolution" sorting might be useful to find pictures that look life-size on your monitor. In any case, it costs nothing to keep it there, so I'm unlikely to remove it.

Am a big fan of high resolution. It should be, in my opinion, one of the leading criteria in searching for pics.

The potential downside to going with a Favorite only system is the number of Favs that will pile up in one's account. I've always tried to limit my Favs to just a few hundred so I can find them as I go forward. I don't have any idea at all how people with 5,000 or more Favs can keep track of them; or if they even bother. I've even found fellow members who may hav 30,000 or more Favs. To me, making a picture a Favorite conveys a status that the model is important enough to continue to track. I guess the only option will be to periodically go through my Favs and clean them out.

Exactly!
That is the major drawback of this system. Not always a good score was accompanied by a favorite. But now if you want to say that a picture is good, by force we have to make favorite.
As a result our favorites will be getting bigger, so we would have to clean them occasionally. And when the favorite is removed, the photo, which is still as good as before is harmed.
I think the best solution would be to implement a system of "like or dislike" as YouTube or one option as the "greenlight" of Steam.

The idea is that people don't change their favoriting behavior, so that those pics that happen to get favorited the most rise to the top.

The problem with the binary (-1, 1) voting system is there is no good way to transition to it from the 0-10 scale for older pics (which is even more true now that lots of pictures don't have 0-10 ratings anymore).

If you put a picture on your favorites it is to view it later without the risk of forgetting. If this saturated with unnecessary photos you have to clean.

I'll give an example: Melissa Wee. In my opinion it is one of the best models of GWM. She has 580 photos, and all of them are good. But in many of her pictures she looks posing in the same way and her body has not changed much over time.

What I did with the old system was to give 8.9 or 10 to all of her photos and chose for my favorites that I thought best (as I said, has many similar photos to each other).

Now I have no choice but to make favorite all of her photos, because otherwise it would indirectly saying that the picture is not good. And I will remove those photos later if I do not want my favorites are unusable.

I think good idea to remove the system from 1-10, but I think it would replace it with another system, separate from the favorites.

Sorry for my bad English.

I’m a little late to the party (as, alas, is so often my usual habit) but here goes:

There’s no question that the 0-10 scoring system was being horribly abused.  Once a few people discovered that they could have a disproportionate impact on the scoring by voting only tens and zeros, any honest objectivity in the scoring was completely lost.

But, there were other problems, too. Whenever we scored a particular photo, we all had to ask: what are we judging it against?  If we compare the women of GWM with the women we see at the local Wal-Mart, then practically every photo would rank a “9” or “10” (which could, perhaps, explain some of the “ten-bombing” we were seeing).  But, if that photo was being judged against all of the other photos on the GWM site … well, then the judging naturally becomes a lot harsher. 

I tried to take a middle ground, granting most of the photos sevens or eights (and reserving my nines and tens for the really outstanding photos) but of course, with everyone using a different scoring standard, it naturally created inconsistencies in the scoring.

It’s also worth noting, though, that (for many of us) the scoring wasn’t always a “how beautiful is this woman” kind of score. I have a few women who are among my particular favorites (say, Karina Nascimento) but if it was a photo of her that was just poorly done (bad lighting, out-of-focus, etc.) I’d still give it a poor score. That poor score meant absolutely nothing against beautiful Karina  – the photo got a poor score because it was, technically, just a poor photo.

So, while I liked the general “concept” of the scoring system, I understand the reasons for its demise.

I might note, though, that the image ratings also served a secondary purpose for me: it helped me remember where I left off from the last time I visited.  My work schedule is such that I can sometimes only visit once or twice a week, and it’s not always easy to remember where I’d been the last time I visited (especially when there could be two-dozen pages of new photos waiting for me). By using the scoring system, I’d scan through all the new pages, and when I started seeing pictures that I’d previously rated, I knew that I’d gone through all the new ones.

I suppose I could use “Favorites” for this, but (as Kakuzade noted) I’d soon have so many photos in my Favorites file that it would become too cumbersome to use. 

Also (again, as Kakuzade noted) not everyone has been using the “Favorites” list for simply listing their favorites. I have been using my “Favorites” list to log photos of all the great-looking women who were identified as “Unknown.”   I’d tag these photos as Favorites, and then check back in a week or two to see if someone had come up with their identity (I may have been the only one who used my “Favorites” list for this purpose, though). 

In any case, compiling a list of everyone’s top “Favorites” may not actually represent what it seems.

One option, I guess, might be to create a new category of “Super Favorites” (or whatever). The old “Favorites” files could then serve as a voting mechanism (and if everyone wound up with 30,000 photos in their “Favorites” files, it wouldn’t matter). We could all then use our new “Super Favorites” file just as we had been using the old “Favorites” list up until now. 

Or, alternatively, perhaps something as simple as a “Like” button could be created to begin compiling all the positive votes, and the existing “Favorites” file could be kept just as it was.  Of course, we wouldn’t be able to count all the current “Favorites” under such a system.

Just some ideas, not really complaints.  And thank you, Chainer, for you efforts, we do appreciate it.

What I am gathering out of feedback I've gotten (here and elsewhere) is:

• The ratings system was flawed and is not missed in its old form.
• What is missing, though, is the interactivity the ratings provided, i.e. some way to express "liking" an image without putting it in your favorites list in your profile.

In response to the second point, I am planning to implement a way to +1 a picture without having it appear in your favorites. The total score of a picture will be determined by the sum of its +1s and favorites. This way, for example, if you like all pictures of a model you can +1 all her pictures while only favoriting the select few you like the most.

Hey Chainer, I think the +1 option that you mentioned is a great idea - Facebook does this and it works well for billions of pics. This removes the negativity of rating and also gives the possibility to like a picture without putting it into ones favourites, which is very important for me and others too. Great work in maintaining the site for all those years! Thank you for that! 👍🏻
don

I agree with replies 14 15 16. Now can we bring back the random button?  :'(   

I've implemented the +1 option. It appears under every image and has the effect of increasing an image's score by 1 (just like adding to favorites) without actually adding it to your favorites list. This means you can vote on images without worrying about cluttering your favorites.

A definite improvement!

Wow, thank you, Chainer!  This new system is exactly the kind of thing  I was hoping you would implement.

Much appreciated!

Ratings always did seem a bit douchy to me.  It's kind of an insult to be doing that, though I understand Chainers original intent behind it.  I'm just not so sure everyone else did.