What do the news ratings of positive and negative really mean?

[jbg232]

I've been trying to figure out what the "positive" and "negative" rating on the macrumors news articles on the homepage actually symbolizes.

Is positive:

1) I like this topic because it's interesting
2) I agree with ______ topic (ie Yay, yay, iphone is coming to verizon)
3) Keep posting topics like this

And negative:

1) This topic is not interesting
2) I don't care about _____ topic (ie Boo, boo, iphone coming to verizon)
3) Please stop posting topics like this

Or is it something else that I'm missing entirely?

 

[r.j.s]

What do the positive and negative ratings on the front page mean?
They mean different things to different people. A positive rating can be a vote of confidence that a rumor is true, a belief that a product announcement is a positive development, happiness with the performance of a software update, and so on. A negative vote could have just as many different meanings. Even the most positive news can get some negative votes; that's fine, everyone has an opinion.

Note that the vote counts you see are not updated instantly when you vote. The display is cached for performance reasons, since we have a large volume of site traffic. Your vote was counted and the number will be updated within minutes.

https://macrumors.zendesk.com/hc/en...nd_negative_ratings_on_the_front_page_mean.3F

 

[Blue Velvet]

Can't ever recall any long-term or high-contributing members or moderators ever showing the slightest concern about the ratings of any news piece. Unless they play some purpose in compiling some invisible metric, they don't affect anything by pushing down or bumping a story.

Like a poorly-constructed poll, the results can be spun any way that people see fit, yet the results appear to matter little. They could disappear overnight and the site wouldn't suffer for it in the slightest, in my admittedly limited view... perhaps a small additional percentage would comment in the forums instead of solely rating an article, which could be a relative bonus.

 

[GGJstudios]

Can't ever recall any long-term or high-contributing members or moderators ever showing the slightest concern about the ratings of any news piece.

There are ratings on news articles? When did this happen?

 

[WildCowboy]

While it's true that they mean different things to different people and are thus useless for getting any serious information out of them, I still follow them as they provide an interesting snapshot of the overall sentiment regarding a certain topic.

It's sometimes interesting to see that sentiment swing in the completely opposite direction from where I thought it would go for a given article, and that spurs me to dig into the thread a bit more to try to find out why and what aspect of the topic I might not have considered.

 

[Blue Velvet]

I still follow them as they provide an interesting snapshot of the overall sentiment regarding a certain topic.

Hadn't considered it from an editorial POV. I think that's the first time I've seen this rationale.