34
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
34 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
4350 readers
134 users here now
The Lemmy.zip Gaming Community
For news, discussions and memes!
Community Rules
This community follows the Lemmy.zip Instance rules, with the inclusion of the following rule:
- No NSFW content
You can see Lemmy.zip's rules by going to our Code of Conduct.
What to Expect in Our Code of Conduct:
- Respectful Communication: We strive for positive, constructive dialogue and encourage all members to engage with one another in a courteous and understanding manner.
- Inclusivity: Embracing diversity is at the core of our community. We welcome members from all walks of life and expect interactions to be conducted without discrimination.
- Privacy: Your privacy is paramount. Please respect the privacy of others just as you expect yours to be treated. Personal information should never be shared without consent.
- Integrity: We believe in the integrity of speech and action. As such, honesty is expected, and deceptive practices are strictly prohibited.
- Collaboration: Whether you're here to learn, teach, or simply engage in discussion, collaboration is key. Support your fellow members and contribute positively to shared learning and growth.
If you enjoy reading legal stuff, you can check it all out at legal.lemmy.zip.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I notice you are using a nineteen point rating scale, going from 1 to 10 with halves in between and a slider. You will get better ratings if you use a more standard scale that's compatible with other sites and a better method for inputting ratings.
You'll want to link your rating data to other sites (eg, backloggd.com, igdb.com) if you have any hope of this being used, so that's why compatibility is valuable. Mapping a 10 point scale to a 19 point scale is a silly wrench to throw in, and how will you translate your users' 19 point scale to push to sites with 10? You need to be able to keep users from entering scores over again to survive at all.
As to entry, something almost everything gets wrong is you actually get better data if you present ratings with the right number of points to the scale and use a tiered grouping (visually, not as in requiring a series of questions for a single rating). There's basically a right answer here, and its 10 points grouped 3-4-3. The grouping helps cognitively because you're basically picking high-mid-low twice instead of analyzing a 10 point spread. People are significantly statistically worse at using a wide, flat rating scale, and the two-tier version corrects that and gives you richer and more accurate data, especially if you label the tiers, to help reduce individual bias about how they apply their feelings to numbers (eg the modern 6/10=bad syndrome).
We need better rating analyzers than we have, but it will never work without connecting to other rating systems and processing games outside itch.io. And if you keep your recommendation mechanism under wraps with only manual rating entries, especially limited to itch.io games, you're asking far too much from someone to see if it's potentially relevant to them, both in the sense of effort and the sense of trust ("non-biased, community driven").
Hi, thanks very much for this feedback, love it ❤️
I never heard about backloggd.com, but it's a good long-term thinking from you, that if the project survives to a stage where it has a big userbase, it's a good idea to have compatibility or "plugins" with other trackers and data sources.
I also like your idea with the rating scale, I will definitely think about implementing your idea or some variation of it.
Yeah, it would be stupid to lock the project inside of itch.io games only. I started from itch.io and indie games for a few reasons:
In the future, I definitely plan to support all popular PC game stores in the following order:
I also think about the support of the consoles, but this will be in the rather distant future.
I have one more question, if you don't mind - what is your feeling about game recommendations after you rated 3-4 games? Were recommendations lean towards predicable "correct" way, or were they completely random and off?
I didn't rate any games, just looked at what it would take and had some quick feedback to offer. Part of the issue with Itch is that to rate games, you have to first find things on itch, as well as find things that'd be representative so you might see how recs do. For testing something that isn't going to do much right now, that's a fair bit of trouble, especially since my key interest would be whether recommendations really take taste into account or use one of the usual shortcuts that either lump you into categories or fall prey to the "well everyone likes X so X" syndrome. Either of those would take a fair bit of data for me to put in, and a rather surprising amount of data for you to already have at such an early stage.
Hi, I see, hopefully you will be willing to participate in further testing (for example, in beta) when the project is in better shape.
The only reason I bring the current alpha to the public is to test the concept and see if people are interested in it at all. I spent around 1 year (1 year of time, not of working hours) to make the current alpha, and there is no sense in spending one more year on a project nobody actually wants. For now, feedback was somewhat positive, so I want to continue and see what I will build next.
The main idea of my recommendation algorithm is to calculate the unique test for every user. It doesn't and wouldn't compare the tastes of different users to calculate assumptions. I hate this, and those kinds of recommendation algorithms seem to never work for me. When doing my research on the beginning of the project, I found that such algorithms were first used for social media, but I don't feel these algorithms are correct (as I feel it, I can't prove this with real numbers for now).
So, hopefully, Gamescovery recommendation algorithms wouldn't have biases like "well everyone likes X so X”, since it never tries to compare 2 or more users. Besides that, Gamescovery will allow users to tweak the algorithm so that users can actually customize it to make the algorithm better for them. That doesn't mean users will be able to completely change the behavior of the algorithm, but rather direct it in a direction they want.