There are currently three types of users on Cent: those who bounty ETH seeking responses, those who earn ETH by contributing their time and creativity to active bounties, and those who earn ETH by sorting the responses bounties receive. Today we will be taking a deep dive into sorting.

Why sorting?

Sorting is the simplest way to quickly identify and feature the highest quality responses under each bounty.

In practice users curate the best responses by sorting through pair sets of responses. These pair sets appear in descending order below bounty posts.

At Cent we developed an Iterative Comparison Algorithm — or ICA — that allows for the progressive evaluation of good responses against other good responses to find and feature the best, and bad responses against other bad responses to find the worst responses and send them to the bottom of the response thread.

And while we still have a long way to go, it’s been working pretty well.

If you scroll through posts with expired bounties, you’ll find lists of responses with the best responses featured at the top. Every post produces curated lists of quality responses thanks to our sorting structure. In short, sorting is the mechanism that allows the one-of-a-kind human taste of thousands of users to be combined with our algorithm to produce lists of lasting value.

Check out a recent example of a curated list of the best of the internet last week here.

So how do users get paid for sorting?

Any responses you sort will get you paid. I repeat: getting paid for sorting is guaranteed. Currently 20% of each bounty is divvied up amongst Centians who sort responses.

So for example, if there is a $200 bounty a whopping $40 will be distributed to users who sort responses to that bounty.

The actual share of each 20% portion of every bounty that a user will receive for sorting is proportional to the number of ‘sorting actions’ a user takes in relation to the total number of sorting actions taken by the total number of users who sort responses to a particular bounty. Wow, what a sentence.

How should users sort responses?

As more and more users join Cent and participate in the sorting process, the variety of standards used to sort responses is growing.

When sorting was first introduced, it was assumed that most users would thoroughly read through each response and pick the “better” answer. While users have indeed been picking the “better” answers, the actual sorting heuristic employed to pick “better” answers seems to vary from user to user. In other words, there is no single “right” way to sort responses.

Users appear to optimize for a myriad of different factors when they sort responses including, but in no way limited to: formatting, tone, appearance, content, brevity, detail, accuracy, humor, sarcasm, and probably more.

A key point to notice is that a lot of the standards applied to sorting don’t require the sorter to spend a lot of time looking at the responses in detail. That’s not to say that any standard is right or wrong, it’s just important to be aware that there are many standards that can be applied to sorting.

What if users just blindly vote?

Before wrapping up this edition of Spotlight, I want to take a second to address the concerns that a few Centians have voiced regarding users who may be “blindly sorting” responses as a way to make a quick buck.

As mentioned above, the quality of responses sorted to the top has continued to increase. And it’s that high quality that, at least at this point, should dispel most concerns. Again, as alluded to already, it may be that a number of users simply optimize for a specific visual factor when sorting.

That said, if you see the quality of ranked responses slipping, let us know by sending us a message here.

That’s all for this edition of Spotlight. If you enjoyed this please share it on Twitter or whatever you use.