Topic: Introducing Artist Tier Distribution

Have you rated a lot of releases of a particular artist? There is now a cool visualization of your ratings on the artist page, grouping the releases into six tiers (from "bad" to "masterpiece"). Check it out and let me know what you think about it!

This would be cool to implement as a collection view option - all of your rated albums appear on the chart, if this isn't too hard to implement (hopefully it wouldn't be too slow)

Also, are we going to have the ability to sort the chart by descriptors, again?

The entire collection in tiers … I can absolutely do that, but if you want it all on one page without pagination it would be very slow and memory consuming for the browser, at least for my 1000+ releases …

I’d like to do that without the cover-art, but with rating dropdowns, as a way to fine-tune the ratings. Is that the use case you have in mind?

Yeah I figured having it all on one page would be way too resource intensive. But with rating dropdowns that could work.

I remember on "That Metal Show", they'd occasionally make a guest artist rank all of their recordings in order. I thought that was a pretty cool way to get them to look at their whole body of work objectively. So I enthusiastically endorse this feature.

Now, what I'd really like is a way to see this outside of just my ratings - mostly to see how an artists's releases stack up based on what the community average is. I currently look at this on PA (although it's more effort because they don't have your mode of presentation) to see what might be a good place to start listening to an artist I'm just starting to think about.

BTW, programmer to programmer - a pet peeve of mine on sites that offer ratings, is that an item with just a very few ratings can jump to the top of the ratings chart, over other items that have a universal consensus of "excellent", because in a big world like ours you'll always have at least some people counter-weighting the scores of those well-known items. Something with a 100 "8" ratings should probably be higher than something with just one rating that hapens to be a "9". I'm surprised that more sites don't use something like "Bayesian averages" to weight more highly items that have broader support than those with just a little, since the math complexity and the query expense isn't that big a deal.

^ It's hard to rank things fairly. Ideally I would want to prevent releases with a few stellar ratings to overtake classic releases which will always be dragged down by some "haters", as you describe. On the other hand I also want to prevent these classics to always occupy the top positions.

One thing that I'm doing in the ranking: items that have a high standard deviation in their tag assignments are boosted by half the standard deviation. The thinking is that great releases invariably attract some haters. So while their extremely negative ratings drag the median down, the boosting restores some of that.

The other thing is that I'm using a logarithm to "deboost" extremely high numbers of ratings.

Now, what I'd really like is a way to see this outside of just my ratings - mostly to see how an artists's releases stack up based on what the community average is. I currently look at this on PA (although it's more effort because they don't have your mode of presentation) to see what might be a good place to start listening to an artist I'm just starting to think about.

Yes, I can do that quite easily - just add a toggle in the artist tier UI to switch between your rating and the overall rating. :-)

Done! You can now toggle between tiers based on overal rating (average) and your rating.

Wow! That's service! Thanks for that.

I notice that here, and other places where you're showing just the cover art for a bunch of releases, a problem when there's no cover art available. For example, take a look at the Tiers for the artist Mystery. Two of their releases have no cover art, and those wind up being completely generic and indistinguishable - I have no idea what releases those represent, without actually clicking on them.

I suggest that, first of all, there should a hover tooltip kind of thing showing at least the name, and maybe some other vital information, of any release you hover the mouse over. (I say any release, not just the no-cover-art ones, because it's often hard to discern which release a given image is anyway.) And maybe just for those that don't have their own cover art, you could superimpose the release name as text in the box that holds the cover art.

EDIT: don't look at my example of Mystery - I just added links to PA for the two releases missing images, and I guess from that your bot retrieved the cover art.

^ yes, we are scanning the page and extract generic info about the release. With PA only the cover art is extracted, and also only if there isn’t already cover art present. From Musicbrainz and Bandcamp we also load track list and release date.

Gotcha. So in the future, adding a MB or BC link is of higher value than a PA link.

Yes, the best order would be BC, MB, PA, Spotify. I've been looking up about 5k releases on those sites, it has been a lot of work. Would really be cool to outsource that a little bit to all the users - and that's also what PA and RYM are doing.

I suggest that, first of all, there should a hover tooltip kind of thing showing at least the name, and maybe some other vital information, of any release you hover the mouse over. (I say any release, not just the no-cover-art ones, because it's often hard to discern which release a given image is anyway.) And maybe just for those that don't have their own cover art, you could superimpose the release name as text in the box that holds the cover art.

I'm avoiding tooltips in general because the website should work really well on mobile devices and tablets. I introduced the tiers like this (with only the cover art) because I saw people using tiermaker on Facebook.

I think the best way to do this could be to show more info as an overlay on the cover art when you tap/click it. Another solution would be to enable other templates for the view, like I do on the browse releases page ...

Introduced one more tier to distinguish ok (~5) and good (~6).