Ok, I'm starting a new thread for this as the subject apears slightly fragmented across other threads, and here I want to propose a concrete idea:

Members have a public Kudos value.

This should be an accumulative value, and can be increased, for example by the following actions:

(*) number of audio reviews posted to other musicians in a battle
(*) number of votes given to other musicians in a battle
(*) discretionary points could be awarded for contributions to the site, such as articles and advice
(*) finishing in the top X of a battle (would be nice to be top 10 - makes it more accessible)
(*) taking part in colaborations

Maybe somehow personal musical progession could also contribute? Perhaps based on an increase in the average rating received?

Obviously, one of the aims of this is to encourage people to vote and to comment. Primarily voting, hence voting should increase kudos significantly. Kudos dependant on a battle would obviously be calculated and added after the battle.

Additionally I would include the following:

An auto playlist in the users home page where they can select all the songs for which they voted more than X, hence a favorites playlist is automatically generated.

When navigating away from an audio review page and voting has not or is not taking place, the user should be prompted to vote with a dialogue box - they can still choose "I will vote later" or something, so it's not too aggresive.

Somehow TheAmp should also facilitate voting - havent thought too much about that yet.

Let me also add, that a comment is not a vote...   A vote is a rating from the drop down box..  Even if someone does not wish to comment, that does not mean your vote isn't important..perhaps it isn't your style of music, and you really don't know what to say.. fine, but please vote, give it a rating based on the clarity of music, the production quality, be sure to read the description as there are sometimes circumstances that hinder production quality, and therefore that should be taken into consideration.. then there is does the song  have a "catchyness"(is that a word?)  Does it have a message? Is there Emotion and feeling in it? even if it isn't your style of music, a song can move you... if it does, this should raise your rating of the song....  This is what I look at... I know that I cannot afford a good home studio, but I put all of myself into most of my songs... some not so much as they are meant to be fun, or just weird.. but most of them are ME, ALL OF ME...  so when I hear a song, even if it is kind of off on the levels a bit, or there is a bit of noise, I still rate it based on the SONG, the FEELING.. I would give a rating of say 70 percent to one that has a great feel and lots of emotion even if the quality isn't real good.. because they did it.. they moved me.. production is important... but you can have a professional studio produce a crappy song...  so these are things I look at when I rate a song... 
            anyway, I have now written too much and my hand is cramping so...
                                          
                                                           JimK

Your hand may be cramping... but you're right about it, most definately.

I'm not too much for the kudos thing.

for instance:
(*) number of audio reviews posted to other musicians in a battle
   
    I don't want to post anything that doesn't make sense, or if it would mean repeating myself. like to some artists putting great songs on here, I only comment to two or three of them, explaining why I think their style is great and why I don't comment to each and every one of their songs. "wow, this is great!" or something, IMO, isn't much of a comment. How would you filter these kinds of comments out of the kudos ranking?

(*) number of votes given to other musicians in a battle

    This I totally agree with. Show a public statistic with the number of votes given and just for the heck of it, the average of all of those votes. This will somehow show something about the listening / judging behaviour of a member, and it doesn't ever have to look either especially high or especially low. Also it would become clear that if there was an artist handing out "mediocre" votes to the competition just to compensate for an appaling job of operating a tune himself, and this would be funny to laugh at.

(*) discretionary points could be awarded for contributions to the site, such as articles and advice

    Ah, ok, and who is going to judge this? Is mud or entheon going to read each and every single post on this site? And what about personal biases... This wouldn't be fair. Livadream and Crystalcherry have greatly contributed to the community feel of this site, just don't ask how they did this. Would their kudos be going up or down for it? Livadream no longer has an account...

(*) finishing in the top X of a battle (would be nice to be top 10 - makes it more accessible)

    Nice, but again this is all a matter of taste. Everybody loves JBP. Should you stick more feathers up his back end for having him win the battle? And what about guys like me who have dozens of posts, but create music outside the mainstream, but still like to share just to show that "this is another way of doing it"? Who's going to give me kudos for that? Or is kudos a popularity thing...

(*) taking part in colaborations

    This could be done by having an extra text field on the upload page, in which an artist can fill in other bandamp-members who have contributed to the particular upload. Still I'm not so sure if this'll make a lot of sense. I could tag Grainshifter for being a friend, he will get kudos for no reason, who's going to control this?

And then the musical progression thing... again, who's going to judge that? I tend to upload songs here not to show my current state of production value, but just to find out how people react to some of the oldies I come across, delving in my 600+ song archive. This is equally important to me, and that's why I do it. But I know the production value of my older tunes is much lower than it is today... Who's going to judge on my musical hearing, or the way I select the oldies that I do want to upload?

All in all I think the kudos suggestion is more part of how you, Daeljan, look at the various members, and how you handle your voting behaviour.... It's an interesting concept, but not very practical - coding wise - and definately too much subject to bias...

Your other ideas are more feisable (is that a word? google definition says it's not)

I thought of another thing.

How about an Artist cannot be allowed to put songs in a battle if he hasn't voted (not commented) for each and every one of the songs in the previous battle?

I feel my kudos dropping like crazy here...

Puppet:

Its not really a reflection on how I operate or view things here on BandAmp, I would probably be one of the lowest here as I have been musically inactive now for a while, and will be for a while longer. I can't listen to the music at work, hence I'm not reviewing either.

It also isn't meant to exlude anyones effort - the whole idea was just based around somehow encouraging people in a singularly reflected way to contribute, and more importantly vote - I was sounding off and extrapolating ideas - nothing ever comes of nothing.

Perhaps the kudos idea is crap. I posted it here, so people could post opinions, and if theres anything usefull in the resulting discussion, then thats a positive thing. 

You are a 'Top Member' here on BandAmp - what does that really mean? Not too clear on the front page to a visitor... Why do I mention that? Because that in part inspired the kudos idea.

Also, I don't agree with exclusive mechanisms to coerce people into acting in a certain way. Better to use some sort of encouragement / reward system.

>Perhaps the kudos idea is crap. I posted it here, so people could post opinions, and
>if theres anything usefull in the resulting discussion, then thats a positive thing. 

    well, kudos to you for a smart move

> You are a 'Top Member' here on BandAmp - what does that really mean? Not too
> clear on the front page to a visitor... Why do I mention that? Because that in part
> inspired the kudos idea.

    well, it means I post a lot.... and people let me, because they're either way comfortable with my posts, ignoring them or finding something useful in them all the same. if I were a bottoms posting only "great stuff man!" 700+ times then people are likely to complain... which won't be good for my credibility...

How about a display of "average ranking", siding the number of songs? This would mean handing out a ranking to every song that was in the battle though... And it should also state the number of songs from which the average was derived... like "average rank: 12 out of 3 songs" or something... And then there could be a "Star Status" handed out to the top average ranks or so.... That would change things... I am definately PRO more statistics in the members-headline of individual posts.

[font size=40]bollocks[/size]

[size=40]bollocks[/size

Perhaps individual posts could be rated quickly by all those that read them. So that even if you have thousands of posts you won't get any kudos for them if they all say "yeah, this is great." This solves the problem of time consuming judging for mud and entheon, as well as the credibilty problem. But it would have to be quick and easy; no one wants to click "rate this post" for [i]every[i] post and then have to load up a new page. So just a quick little click-and-drag thing.

Yes, that seems workable (end-user wise). Still I doubt many people will use it, no matter how low the thresh is set. But it could work, most certainly.




ps. sorry for the html experimentation earlier this thread... we were on skype and this was a demonstration of 1 or two things.... I promise none of us will abuse this site for those purposes again! ...