How can we utilize the "Greatest hits" list for our sites?

Question

We have been trying to figure out ways to utilize anon feedback. One idea was to use the information to find questions that are disproportionately popular with the anon and low rep users (aka. The Long Tail).

In particular, look for questions that got a large number of anonymous feedback in relation to the total number of views. These posts are ideal candidates for aggressive maintenance.

We introduced a page on each site with some preliminary work:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/greatest-hits

This list comes in 2 flavours. You can get a global list, or filter it down to questions you answered. (This allows you to gauge feedback on your own posts)

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The algorithm works in the following way:

1. Look at all questions with more than the median amount of views that are older than 3 months, excluding closed and locked questions.
2. Sort by a modified "Views Per Day" which factors in unique anonymous and low rep feedback provided.

Views Per Day: If a post is 30 days old and it has 30 views, we consider it to have 1 view-per-day. This allows us to treat old and new questions slightly more equally.

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The philosophy is that questions on the top of the list deserve some extra "love" cause they are the site's "face" to the public.

1. Can you think of any ways to improve the "greatest hits" algorithm?
2. How can we utilize this information to better our sites?
3. Do we need any "engine level" changes to allow for improving a question/answer set?

Answer 1

Allow Tag Filtering, like you do on the Review page, so people can work on what they know.

or click the tags in the sidebar to narrow and filter.

I like that you have pagination, which is what Review is desperately missing.

Also, on Meta I'd filter out those with moderator tags.

Answer 2

I for one would prefer to see questions that are disproportionately popular with the anon and low rep users listed in one of the tabs at review screen. Because of mentioned disproportion I would rather have this tab called "Greatest misses".

That way would be convenient to me to inspect these questions and up/downvote/flag as needed to re-evaluate these questions from my perspective.

• to avoid misunderstanding - I wouldn't want to review all the high-view count questions, only the part of those that somehow mis-matches with the voice of trusted sub-community. Say,
   
  10K views and single vote - I would want to check how's that? Like questions displayed in votes tab for high view count - when last page(s) are selected
   
  500 'helpful' marks and no upvotes at all - I would want to look at that
   
  etc

Basically I'd want to somehow balance disproportional popularity with heightened attention from reviewers.

Answer 3

I had a small amount of rep on "gaming". I set a bounty which took me down to 3 (or maybe 5?).

That's too low to do anything, but I still get asked if I found this answer useful [YES] [NO].

I suggest, politely, that my votes should be filtered out of your anon feedback stuff. Because i) I'm registered user, on a few SE sites, not a real anon. and ii) I'm too dumb to set a sensible bounty level and so do you really want to include my opinion on anything?

Answer 4

• Could you clarify what the zeros mean? The tooltip says:

So users voted if it was Useful? Yes + No = zero? or Zero Yes votes? Note: I'm not talking about votes for the greatest hits I've participated in. I'm a noob. I've made a minimal contribution. I'd expect to see zeros. I'm referring to the < https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/greatest-hits > page which has zeros on the first page.

• The 'worst-hits' would also be useful -- perhaps as a moderator only page -- to identify questions which could be deleted or contain outdated information. <-- it's in the moderator tools. Cool. I'm not there yet. Thanks waffles!

• And yes, it's silly to even include this, but the 21st page is blank...