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> The difference between 102+/100- votes and 2+/0- votes is large, but invisible on this site.

I wonder whether using a ratio instead of difference would help?

The main difference is a +102/-100 post is "controversial" whereas a +2/-0 post is not. It's interesting to see both what the "net score" is and how "intense" it is.

If by "ratio" you mean showing both the net score and the total number of votes, I guess that would be one way to solve this. But a single ratio score (i.e. net score divided by total number of votes) is probably just going to look weird and useless.

I was thinking of something like (upvotes+1) / (downvotes+1). Adding 1 to denominator is necessary to avoid division by 0. Adding it to numerator too balances it out and makes varying number of downvotes visible in spite of 0 upvotes.

Controversial posts would get a score near 1 instead of fluctuating. You would also get a rough idea of intensity as more ratios become possible when the number of votes increases.

I think it's still simple enough to be transparent to most users.

Didn't we just have a conversation about how not to average things? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29200103

The same principle could be applied to upvotes/downvotes too, yeah?

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