Some way to promote more votes/ratings

Hi. I've been thinking about the star ratings.

I think it's a little bit awkward how rarely they are used, seeing that you can obviously upload a 50+ sound files only to get 2 or 3 ratings.

One of the main reasons I joined Soundsnap for, was to actually receive some form of response to the stuff I created. Not *just* to share material.

So, I'd like to push for some form of making use of the rating thingy, or as coldhearted as it may sound, consider removing it altogether (which would definitely be a pity).

How about having people forced to give a rate before they download something? Or, if that sounds too compelling, maybe loosen it up so that they're forced to rate every 3, 5 or say 10 downloads or something like that?

Best Regards,
Henrik Cederblad

Actually,

Its more important to rate bad sounds, because that way the bad sounds are differentiated from the high quality material. This is especially important for recorded sound effects, where quality is essential for our professional users.

Rating is our main weapon in the battle against low quality recordings!

I just joined the site a few days ago and I've rated just about everything I've listened to/downloaded. I think it helps the composers so they'll have an idea of what types of sounds people are interested in.

One thing we have thought about, is to have a point system that will reward users for some things, like uploading sounds, rating or even posting on forums maybe.

On one hand, we don't want to make this into a competition- it could lower the quality of uploads.

But this would give a motive for users who cannot upload, to contribute to the community by rating.

Then we could have an algorithm that selects the probability of appearing on the 'featured users' block according to this score. This is a complicated but interesting idea i think...

I think it´s not possible to force people to vote although I´d like them to. I don´t download here but I vote a lot, because I belive, we all need feedback in our artistic lives. I checked out a file from the Sonic Art category last night (http://www.soundsnap.com/taxonomy/term/77). Is has been downloaded 107000+ times and only has 2 votes, which is really bizarre. So people come here like into a supermarket, take their favourites and leave without paying. Strange world it is......