Currently, our solution to posts imported from Stack Exchange being too highly represented compared to natively posted posts is a vote-cut algorithm based on community voting, documented here. What I (and a number of other people) first thought to be a well-thought-out algorithm, however, ended up being a very arbitrary algorithm based on what threads that are one day unearthed and found to have a high number of votes. @ArnoldNeumaier proposed a modification to the algorithm, which I initially ridiculed, but now find to be a step in the right direction. Here are the problems with the existing method:
- The process requires someone to nominate the post for a vote cut. This happens highly arbitrarily, and actually dependent on whether the post gets bumped to the main page after being imported (which happens usually because of the automatic tag-edits). This results in a lot of overrated posts which didn't get their votes cut.
- The score depends on how many people agree with the vote cut, rather than the score people agree to cut the vote to. There should be a difference between 5 people saying "this is vastly overrated, the post's score should be brought from +284 to +2" and 5 people saying "yeah, this is somewhat overrated, the post's score should be brought from +284 to +200". However, in both cases, the current formula brings the score to 57, in both cases.
- Because of the above, I found myself abstaining from voting on some nominations, because I felt the existing number of votes is enough, even if I agreed that the post is overrated. However, not everyone does this, and this results in a lot of confusion and badly done vote cuts (and people thinking "well, a lot of people might agree with me, so I won't vote", and then tragedy of the commons).
- The process has often resulted in the order of answers changing, because the vote cuts resulted in the post actually getting underrated, rather than appropriately rated.
- Related to the three above, the votes are reduced too much if a lot of voters agree that it's overrated.
- The OP could deliberately disagree with having their own post's score cut for frivolous reasons.
- The formula is still quite arbitrary.
- Etc.
Please propose alternatives, or vote for the existing algorithm, in separate answers. Write the new algorithm in an objective way, perhaps using "pseudo-code" or in the basic syntax of a well-known programming language (you can use an esoteric language exactly one week from now)
The steps to go about now, would be as follows:
- Revert all changes done to scores with the previous "Not-so-high-quality" queue.
- Cut all existing votes with the successful vote-cut algorithm.
- Modify the import plugin to auto-cut imported votes.
- Create a new queue for further manual changes
- Close the Not-so-high queue and move it