My original implementation of the music4dance voting system included weighted voting. The idea being that an expert in a particular dance style could vote on that style, and that vote would count more than the average community member’s or a list the system ingested from the internet. In practice, I weighted the lists that I got from friends and friendly DJs higher, and everything else got a single vote. A decade or so in, when I realized that I wasn’t getting dance teachers and professional DJs breaking down the figurative door to spend time recommending songs to dance to, and my original weightings were stale enough as to be counterproductive, I wrote some code to go through and normalize all votes to be of equal weight. So we are now in a place where all Dancers, Djs, and web lists get the same weight vote.

Wait – what are you talking about?

In case you haven’t played with this part of the system and are completely confused by the above, here’s the TL;DR – The core of the music4dance catalog is a system that encourages dancers to vote on which songs they like to dance to a style of dance. The more I can encourage folks to participate in this, the more useful it is to search for something like the highest-rated Cha Chas between 100 and 128 BPM. Check out the help page and this post for more info.

What now?

Several things got me thinking about this again, and since the system is still in place to weight votes other than “one.”

First, votes in the system are dominated by lists that have been ingested and not carefully checked, so there is more chaff than I would like. My assumption is that anyone who takes the time to log into the system and vote a song either up or down on a dance has put more thought into that decision than the random list, and could reasonably be weighted higher than average.

Secondly, I have communicated with a number of amateur DJs and dance coordinators who use music4dance. Many of these power users don’t vote a song up until they’ve played it for their dancers and it’s been a success. Should they get n votes (representing some average of the dancers they are spinning for)?

And finally, one of the DJs I’ve been talking to suggested it might be nice to be able to double- or triple-vote, either up or down, songs he thought particularly suited to a dance (or not).

Any of the above would be pretty easy to implement, but I’m torn on adding completely to an already complex system. So, this is definitely something I would like to get more feedback on before moving forward. What do you think?

Step of the Month:

As I noted last time, I’ve traditionally closed out these posts with a generic ask to check out the contributions page and to please send feedback on anything in the post or your general thoughts. That’s been less effective than I like, so I’m pivoting. Each month, I’ll choose one specific ask that may or may not be on the contributions page lists, but would really help keep music4dance and the community strong. I’ve decided to call this section “Step of the Month” – a play on dance steps and steps to help – and see if that gets a response. If the response is to hold your nose and run away from plays on words, please let me know that, too.

The “Step of the Month” for April is to vote on songs that you like to dance to. This will make the catalog more useful for everyone.

Thanks, everyone, for your continued support.

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