Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
If Firefly is an example of what PICS is or could become, the hell with PICS. Firefly encourages and rewards group behavior and suppresses individuality. Firefly would reward the discussion of the latest album by a Columbia or Capitol artist, and discourage discussion of material from independent (real independent) labels. I know because I've been there and spent quite a bit of time trying to get a rating.
this is absolutely ridiculous. the rating system is designed to be incredibly individualized. it uses sophisticated statistical techniques to find the correlations in your UNIQUE ratings given over a set of items with other people's ratings, and weighs future ratings based on these correlations. it may be even dealing with anti-correlations. in fact what you have, in effect, is a system with *no* hardwired ratings. the ratings space is different for *every*single*person* who uses the service.
As I said, I spent considerable time there, and typed in considerable data. I used the help facilities, and I corresponded with the persons who do support. Firefly was not able to make a single correlation or suggestion for me, which BTW, Alexander Chislenko acknowledged as a weakness of the (current/old) Firefly system. Perhaps you should ask him what the problem is, if you have a curiosity about it. [snip]