Yes, and for that reason it may not be correct to interpret the score of a post as the “collective eagerness” to see more posts like it, and therefore not entirely appropriate to draw the kind of comparison you’re drawing.
Unless people upvote Yvain’s articles merely because they are Yvain’s (which was what I thought you were getting at, and all I was getting at, with the term “fan”), then we want to interpret high scores as marking posts that have broad appeal, rather than posts which have intense appeal.
Not, “people liked Studies On Excuses almost as much as they liked Generalizing from One Example”, but “almost as many people liked Studies as liked Generalizing”. It makes a difference to me to think of it that way, not sure if it will to you...
If post X has a score strictly less than post Y, then it follows that there are either people who upvoted Y and did not upvote X, or people who downvoted X and did not downvote Y. If I think the score of X should be equal to the score of Y, then I am disagreeing with the voting behavior of the persons in those sets, at least one of which (as I said) is nonempty.
Yes, and for that reason it may not be correct to interpret the score of a post as the “collective eagerness” to see more posts like it, and therefore not entirely appropriate to draw the kind of comparison you’re drawing.
Unless people upvote Yvain’s articles merely because they are Yvain’s (which was what I thought you were getting at, and all I was getting at, with the term “fan”), then we want to interpret high scores as marking posts that have broad appeal, rather than posts which have intense appeal.
Not, “people liked Studies On Excuses almost as much as they liked Generalizing from One Example”, but “almost as many people liked Studies as liked Generalizing”. It makes a difference to me to think of it that way, not sure if it will to you...
If post X has a score strictly less than post Y, then it follows that there are either people who upvoted Y and did not upvote X, or people who downvoted X and did not downvote Y. If I think the score of X should be equal to the score of Y, then I am disagreeing with the voting behavior of the persons in those sets, at least one of which (as I said) is nonempty.