Quote - You reversed what you meant in your first post to saying that there should not be rankings, that is how I read it and I would agree with that. But, you seem to be deffending it now with this last post. Saying that they all deserve to be where they are. Which is it?

 

I've never said I'm against providing users a means to tag an image that's great (look at the end of the first paragraph in my first message), just not to provide five levels of rankings. Five levels allows giving an artist a rating of 1. I don't see a reason for that. Of course, providing a means for everybody to highlight their favorites can result in tit-for-tat praises and things that seem to be unfair. The process still allowed highlighting a lot of great images. To me, that makes it worth keeping the ranking system to highlight what's good. I just don't see a need to provide more than "cool" button to do it. There is no purpose to allow bad ratings.

There were 24,000 images posted to the galleries in the last 45 days. It would be hard, if not impossible, to find one person who would want to rate them all on a regular basis. Even if a critic could be found, nobody would entirely trust the impartiality of that judge.

As far as tit-for-tat goes, I'm not entirely sure that there is a nefarious underground knowingly colluding to give one another grand ratings. Feel free to do some detective work to see if the same people keep writing the same comments on the same artist galleries all the time and report them to the moderators if you uncover a conspiracy.

It's important to keep in mind that there are two aspects to becoming a professional artist. One is obviously developing the skills to produce artwork. The other is marketing the artwork. If anybody wants to make a living as an artist, the latter is, in some ways, the more important of the two. The greatest artist in the world is nobody if the artist's works are not seen. 

Try the tit-for-tat approach and see if it's possible to get into the top 100s. Part of the trick to getting high views is to find ways to get more people to look at your gallery. One way to do that is to comment on other galleries. What seems like a grand conspiracy for some may simply be the act of getting more visibility in the galleries and receiving encouraging comments from others that don't exist so much to boost an image to the top as to provide a friendly comment on that artist's work to say thanks for leaving a nice comment on theirs. For anybody that cannot be bothered, then one must accept one of the reasons why some artist galleries get more views than others. The people who work harder to be seen will have more people looking at their galleries and that can result in more good rankings in an entirely honest fashion. The larger the pool of viewers, the larger the number of good rankings and comments.

There's no perfect system to bring good artwork to the front, so most galleries settle on user input to get it because it's less management work. Eliminating any means to highlight good works isn't the solution either. From what I saw in the top 18, there were enough worthwhile images getting to the top that I consider it better than nothing.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon