Monday, March 20, 2006

I Heart U 2

It's a little surprising that a case like Funk Hustler hasn't come up before. This is where someone hops on mixter with a relatively decent upload, tells all of his friends and relatives (mostly from the uploader's zip code) and they all create an account for the sole purpose of giving their buddy a '5' ratings and rave review.

Of course when you look at the "Listener's Pick" charts it looks the community has rallied around this upload as their 'favorite' which of course couldn't be further from reality.

So I did a little experiment on my developer's machine: what if the rater had a rating based on the number of reviews they left. So a '4' given by CDK or teru would weigh more than '5' from a person with 1 review. When I recalculated the 'recent' charts I was very happy with the results because artists the community actually admires (teru, path, trifonic, etc.) came out way ahead of 'Funk_Hustle'. However, then I scrolled down to the 'all time' list and got all misty eyed. The chart on the right is a screen capture of the results.

Clearly, this is not something I can check in "as is" (or can I??? bwahahahaha) but I did get a great laugh out of it.

BTW I should probably point out that this happened because of a bug in the rating system: all ratings before last October have the wrong person in the 'rater' field -- the system thinks the rater is the same person that uploaded the track.

4 comments:

Gurdonark said...

I liked the song quite well, and commented as much. But it is amusing that so many friends and such signed on to "propel" it to the "top". It says a good thing for mixter that this is such a rare thing. I imagine that the band thought this would "help" in the contest, but I somehow think that film people want to follow their vision of the film rather than 15 newbies' rave reviews :).

teru said...

First off, 1000 Years is one of my personal faves. Can't be all "bug". : )

I always found it wierd that people without any uploads could review in the same way as contributors. I appreciate all feedback but it's nice to know a little bit about the reviewer. Musical tastes, whether they understand the concept of a remix, etc... Not that it's required but it's just nice to know.

Hey, can we call any future similar attempts "Funk Hustling"? I'm actually kind of impressed, my friends wouldn't do that for me unless I paid them. ; )

How about a "visitors pass"? Making it easier and less intimidating for people just interested in listening to rate and comment. It would make it easier to identify "Funk Hustling" in the future.

blah?

fourstones said...

cdk: I guarantee we will never see those folks again, not to upload or review anything. If I remember two of his 'buddies' slammed a bunch of '1' ratings around but with my fancy new 'nuke this rater' it was easy to undo their work. Like I said, it's a little surprising it hasn't happened before (that's a way of life over at songfight.org and I suspect remixfight.org)

If I were a mathemtician (where I'm not even sure that's how to SPELL it) it would have taken me two minutes to factor in the 'weight' of the reviewer, but as it is I spent two hours on it and things kept getting screwier.

and YES OF COURSE we HAVE to call this phenom 'funk hustling' and the feature fix (when I figure it out) as 'anti-funk-hustling'

fourstones said...

oh, I completely agree which is why I looked at it in the first place (not that the track is 'a piece of crap' but it's hardly the best recent track on the site) -- I'll figure it out, don't you worry ;)