This app was mentioned in 3 comments, with an average of 1.00 upvote
At first I addressed it as a election voting thing since that's what that website touts it as, but that is mostly irrelevant for this application. I included the original text below anyways in case you are curious.
Now for a website the results are different, but that page is also useless information. Voting in an election is completely different than voting on a comment (or for a product). For one thing the participation rates are very different. Voter turnout rate is around 50% in federal elections. In comparison 1-5% of people rated candy crush and that's with all the prompts and begging for ratings that android apps do, expect your comments to have a much lower number of rate of votes.
What you need to look at is other rating systems. And they help determine appropriate content, but the thing is that they really need a lot of votes in order to work out. Range voting tells you what the average person thinks of something but you need a large sample size in order to get a good idea of what the population as whole thinks.
Reddit's best algorithm (which you do not have implemented, it's a bit more complicated then you've described ) works by predicting what the final score would be using statistics. It actually completely ignores time, since time is not useful for ranking the best one. (It's useful for ranking posts so that new posts appear near the top).
The thing is that range voting assumes that it's capturing information about how strongly you like or dislike something. But most users are already too lazy to vote with a simple system, making a much more complex system (clicking once to vote, then moving the mouse potentially literally all the way across screen, and then trying to click a tiny bar is tricky, make sure you read up on Fitt's Law here) necessarily means it's going to be trickier to vote, so I'd expect even a smaller turnout. So it's capturing even less information. With up/down voting you capture all the votes for people who feel strongly one way or another (people in the <25% or >75% range), which means there's very little you aren't capturing.
I'd strongly recommend simplifying the UI voting. I get that you might feel strongly that it's better and you want to stick your ground and stand out. But you should provide an option to either turn off that voting site/community wide (for people that don't agree) or better yet a way for users to quickly vote. A star system is the typical approach to doing quick range voting, and you can provide the more complex UI for those that really care. Also I'd suggest providing a way to enter it via keyboard for people who want precision.
I'm not sure what sorting algorithm it is that you have implemented. It looks like it'd have a similar effect to reddit's hot algorithm, but reddit's hot algorithm is more complex that that still.
You can read more about reddit's best algorithm (which is by far the best feature of reddit) in a post by Randall Munroe who advocated pretty hard for it. And it is not mutually exclusive with using range voting (range voting just changes the formula) so I'd highly recommend implementing it.
Original arguments about range voting in elections
The problem with that systems is that the votes are not a finite resource. And people usually want their vote to count the most. And how do you make your vote count the most? Vote all the way one way or another.
Especially once you get into strategic voting. If you strongly like then you'll vote 100% for your candidate and 0% for every other candidate (same for hating a candidate only reverse).
For a government election I much prefer preferential voting which solves all the problems of first pass the post without introducing lots of major new ones.
By the way that page has quite a few mistakes and actually doesn't really shed range voting in a positive light
> If you were trying to design the worst way to vote, you might: > > ... > > Make it easy for fraudsters to invalidate ballots ("overvoting").
Yeah it's actually the same. At least in political elections, ballots are invalidated whenever a mark is left. So you just have to leave any sort of mark. Even something on the outside. So this isn't really a problem that's solved here.
And on their better Soft Quorum page
> But in our extensive poll/test experiences with real voters, the former behavior [voters give unknown-to-them candidates minimum score] is actually substantially more common (e.g. in one study we found it was 1.7× more common).
So that goes to show that people don't default to "hmm I don't know, just leave that as it is", they default to "no that guy must suck".
This will mean unknown candidates get a large amount of zeros, and known candidates will almost automatically get a higher score because of that (only a known candidate who's universally hated will do as poorly as an unknown candidate). This is especially bad for getting information from a voter, because a 0 vote could mean that that candidate was absolutely hated with all of the voters heart, or just that the voter hadn't heard of them. It ends up no different than plurality in terms of getting unknown or 3rd party candidates to win.