The reason this is challenging is because it's a social ranking problem, for which we know a strictly optimal solution doesn't exist: #849906
Thus, the only thing you can do is pick between different tradeoffs.
In terms of ranking items, I think there's usually a tradeoff between quality (surfacing the best posts), equity (not letting a few users' preferences dominate the result), and transparency (a system that is easy to understand and verify)
Between sats-based, upvote-based, and zaprank-based, i'd probably categorize as follows:
I'd note that most upvote systems share zaprank's equity and transparency scores. In practice, not all upvotes are equal. It's probably even worse in terms of transparency: the process of gaining trust is completely opaque.
social ranking problem, for which we know a strictly optimal solution doesn't exist: #849906quality(surfacing the best posts),equity(not letting a few users' preferences dominate the result), andtransparency(a system that is easy to understand and verify)