Choosing Good Pictures

Here's some thoughts on choosing images to a character, or adding images to a character:

1) We're not an imageboard or a -booru. So we don't need to have a huge number of images for each character. It's probably better to have one really good image than one good image and a lot of mediocre ones. 

2) The image should represent the character well. This means that it should use their usual hairdo, style, etc.  If a character usually wears a school uniform, but wore a bikini once, you should try to find an image of her in the uniform. 

3) Generally, images should at least have the character from the waist up. A tightly cropped image of the character's head leaves out a lot, and should be avoided if there are alternatives.

4) Try not to crop the head. The hairdo is really important, so try not to crop it out.

What do you think is important in pictures? Post it as a comment here.

50 Thousand Votes

Just noting that, thanks to the community, we now have had 50 thousand votes. We also have 338 characters --- the vast majority added by the community. Thanks!

Open Thread

Want to comment on the site, or just vent? Post here.

1/6/11 Updates & Thanks

I've added support for keeping a history of daily leaders. Each night, at 3:01am Eastern time (12:01 am Pacific), the site will archive the current rating of every character. That information will be put up on the new daily leaders page, which will show 6 or 7 days of past winners, once enough information is available.

We now have 232 characters in the database. About two-thirds of those have been contributed by the users of the site - thanks!

At this point, I'm not sure there's much left to do for MoéMash, feature-wise. I'm pretty happy with the current version of the ranking system. From here on, what happens is up to the voters.

1/1/11 Updates

After a day of operation, I realized the site was way too swingy. The problem was that each user could vote once for each pair of characters. The average change in character position was 16 points - so with 100 characters, a single user could swing a character by over 1600 points in a single day.

I've changed the system a bit. First of all, I've changed the way we calculate k, which controls the amount of change per vote. Now, it's 32 (for an average change of 16) when the character has less than 50 votes, and 16 (8) after that. This should limit the amount of change that happens.

Next, I've changed things so that a person can only vote for or against a given character once per day. This means that a single person can only change a character's rank by a maximum of 32 points per day - and 8  or less is more likely, once things stabilize. I'd like MoéMash to reflect community rather than individual opinion, and hopefully these changes will improve that.

Since the rating formula changed, I reset every character's rating to 1500. Hopefully, I won't have to do that again. (But we are still in beta.)

Welcome to MoéMash

So what is MoéMash?

MoéMash is an idea I had a few months ago, while watching The Social Network. In that movie, Mark Zuckerberg created a website called Facemash, which was basically a hot-or-not site that used Elo rankings to allow people to rank Harvard co-eds.

That might have been at least a little unethical, since the participants on the site didn't really have a choice about how they wanted to be there or not. But if we bring this into the 2D world, many of those issues go away. Moé contests have existed for a while now, and as far as I can tell, none of the participants have complained.

MoéMash is a little different from existing Moé contests. Whereas a contest like Saimoe captures a single moment in time, MoéMash is intended to be an ongoing ranking system. While we'll always have a leader, we'll never be able to crown a single champion.

MoéMash is really dependent on the support of our users. Without users ranking the characters, the site won't work. Without users adding new characters, the site won't grow. What happens next is up to you - I really have no idea what will happen.

I would like to thank the Anonymous who runs http://www.animesaimoe.org/, both for inspiration, and for putting up the image I used to seed this site.

If you have any comments, questions, bug reports, or ideas on how to improve the accouracy of the site's data, please post here in the comments. Thanks!