I just stumbled upon this thread, so I apologize for bringing this up again, but it’s a really interesting read. I noticed the insane boost your addons received during that timespan and actually thought you just bought the reviews because they were super low quality and within a short time frame, lol. The idea of making some add-ons stickies is interesting, but also a slippery slope. Who decides what addon “deserves” to be pinned? With the huge range of things people use Anki for, it’s pretty much impossible to find add-ons that are truly relevant to all.
I honestly don’t like the current ranking system whatsoever and brought it up half a year ago, but Dae said that bad actors already tried to cheat the old system (Cant sort add-ons by its ratings, on add-ons web site? - #4 by dae) and you just proved that the current system can be manipulated just as easily.
It’s also insane how discouraging downvotes can be. I have yet to see a useful downvote on any decent add-on. Most of the time it’s just users reporting a bug (“I got this error xxy pls fix”, “Doesn’t work on the latest version”) or users hating on the addon (AnkiHubs Addon Page is the perfect example). Neither of which has any positive effect on the community. It’s just anecdotal, but I received 3 consecutive downvotes when I first released my addon AnkiCollab, and I was on the verge of quitting all development for it. It’s not fun to work hard on something and then have people be mean about it.
I’m not sure what the point of the review system really is if it’s solely based on up/downvotes. Add-ons with large communities or a way to blackmail users get upvoted, others don’t. Outdated addons can stay at the top (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/498789867) even though they haven’t been updated or useful in 7 years.
The ranking should be more complex and take more things into consideration. Some ideas:
- Time-based ratings (more weight to recent reviews rather than treating all reviews equally)
- Verified reviews (moderate the review pages or allow add-on owners to report reviews)
- Usage metrics (number of active users (if you uninstall the add-on right away, it should have an effect on the add-on’s ranking), update frequency (compatibility with the latest version?), downloads, etc.)
tl;dr
Sticky Addons is not great, because it’s impossible to say which add-ons are “important”
Downvotes are dumb because most have 0 meaning and super discouraging,
the current ranking system does not reflect the relevance of add-ons