Note: Elistic is currently in the very early stages of development. As more members join and begin to participate in the community, and as we deal with people trying to manipulate the system, this stuff is certain to change. Stay up to date here, and through the discussion group.

How Elistic Works

There are three main ways that Elistic collects links into lists: Popular, Recommended, and New. Each is useful in a different way, depending on what you're in the mood to see, and each is described in detail below. Every list can also be narrowed down so that it only shows links belonging to a specific category, such as Events, Politics, etc., by using the main navigation bar at the top of each page.

Popular:
The goal of the Popular list is to show those links that are both frequently and highly rated, while excluding links that are consistently rated poorly.

The Popular list works by assigning a weighted score to every vote made within the last day (the default), week, or month. We add up the scores for each link, and display the list, showing the links with the highest scores first. The weighting system assigns a score of -1 for each rating of one Bullet Point, 0 for two Bullet Points, and 1, 2, or 3 for three, four, or five Bullet Points, respectively.

What that means is that a rating of one Bullet Point and another rating of three Bullet Points would result in a net score of 0 for a given link. A rating of one Bullet Point and another rating of five Bullet Points would result in a net score of 2. This way, if a link receives an overwhelming number of "ones", it will rank poorly on the Popular list.

Recommended:
The Recommended list works a little differently. It uses the votes you have already made to find other users with similar preferences, then finds links that they like which you haven't voted on yet.

Or, more specifically:

1. Elistic finds other users who vote like you do. We first collect all the votes you've made that are either positive (four or five Bullet Points) or negative (one or two Bullet Points). For each of those votes, we find "common votes" — other votes on the same item that are also positive or negative. Your "common users" are the people who have the largest number of votes in common with you.
2. Now that we know your common users, we find all of the links that they have rated positively, but that you haven't rated at all.
3. Finally, we sort all of those links so that the ones found most frequently among your common users come first, and that's your recommended list.

New:
The New list is a lot simpler. It just lists every link that gets posted to Elistic, with the newest links first. It's uncharted territory — your source of fresh and undiscovered links.