There’s not one yet for that. So feel free to submit it.
I always end up wondering about the difficulty part when I see things like the 盾の勇者の成り上がり 1 | L31 novel being L30 and the 盾の勇者の成り上がり 1 | L33 manga being L33, but I suppose unless the user base increases by a lot grading accuracy will just stay a bit hit and miss for less popular things… 
1 Like
I feel a bit like I’m beating a dead horse here, since we had a similar discussion not all that long ago, but I keep coming back to the idea so I kinda just wanted to hear what perspective you all have :b
… what do you all think about changing the grading system to be drag&drop on a sort of ladder, instead of the current system of single book comparisons?
Something like this, with books in the same row being marked as the same difficulty and the higher ones marked as more difficult:
Should drastically reduce the time needed to grade if the system ever got updated to being able to incorporate infinite comparisons from a single user.
Want to change the grading for a book? Just drag it around instead of having to delete all gradings and do them again.
One could potentially even extract more information, like roughly how much more difficult you perceived a book to be instead of just “harder” 
10 Likes
I really like that idea for this point specifically.
4 Likes
This is a really cool idea, I hadn’t thought of anything like this before. I’m not sure how the math would work on the backend but this seems like an intuitive and user-friendly way to rank your library. It would also prevent circular grading paradoxes (as in a>b, b>c, c>a) since the books are all on the same scale.
5 Likes
I like the concept, but I think it could get messy if you read a lot of books. Also, I think if I had a view of everything I’ve ever graded like this, it might become difficult to grade things going forward due to information overload making me try to compare it to everything at once. Whereas right now I can just skip individual comparisons if I feel like I can’t compare them.
8 Likes
Could you perhaps have a hybrid system? Have a few gradings similar to the format we have now, and once the system’s narrowed down a few difficulty “shelves” for you to sort into, it displays just that portion of the “shelving”?
1 Like
Perhaps if it only showed the shelves for the books the system planned to compare against? That would certainly reduce the overwhelming aspect.
That said, I’m not sure a global order for all books exists. So what if you personally said book A is harder than book B, but the overall score says book A is easier than book B? Would the shelf be based on your personal difficulty scoring or the system’s?
3 Likes
I was thinking it would only show your personal rankings. The normal level number would show the system ranking, independent of your personal ranking.
2 Likes
But wouldn’t that break how the comparisons work today? e.g. the system may not allow you to compare two books that are over 5 levels apart, even if you think they are similar in difficulty and want to place them on the same shelf. I’m trying to understand how much this proposal is to change the underlying behavior versus just changing how it’s visualized.
3 Likes
Edit: Moved my reply to the product request to try and keep things a bit more organized.
2 Likes
I’d love that in some fashion. At the very least, i’d love to generate that personal ranked list for you from your comparisons. But if we were to use it as an input mechanism, it’s hard for the grading system to handle it in it’s current form.
We’ve actually discussed before at one point moving away from Elo entirely and focusing on personal ranked lists like you’ve described. The task then would be to combine all those personal user rankings into one global aggregate ranking. However, my understanding is that it’s a relatively open research question in mathematics on how to combine partial ranked links into one aggregate ranking.
Another way would be to generate pairwise comparisons from those ranked list. However, Elo in its present form couldn’t handle those generated comparisons due to the limitation around a single user being limited to ~6 grades a book (as you point out). We could perhaps address that issue with a change to a static Elo system such as bradley-terry which I’ll eventually do… just would take a quite a bit of work and there are lots of high priority things now. However, the static elo system could probably handle the comparisons generated from this interface.
@seanblue does bring up some reasonable interface issues as well. I think i’d always allow you to just do the comparisons in pairs (its easy) but then generate the personal ranked list which you could tweak.
I think this is an interesting idea though, and if you wanted to make a product request, we could chat more there too. 
7 Likes
Made a product request for it. Should have probably started one from the start to keep things organized, but somehow I’m always a little hesistant about creating one. They feel so official…
Posted a question regarding your answer over there 
5 Likes
Just wanted to update you all - still working on movies. The marking tv progress mechanism is just quite tricky and giving me trouble, but I feel confident with everything else.
Additional Details on Issue
As you might imagine, since tv seasons are composed of many episodes and watching sessions (with timing) can span across multiple episodes it’s much more complicated than a movie or a book progress update.
Additionally, since you need to allow users to simply mark episodes watched or not watched individually, you can get some tricky behavior.
And, unfortunately, I think allowing people to update their progress pretty granularly is important for language learners as people watch things very slowly. So this complication is worthwhile and necessary.
In all honesty, I should’ve launched with only movies first, but that’s water under the bridge at this point!
It will launch soon. Perhaps the tv season progress marking may be a bit bumpy, but I need to get this thing out. 
16 Likes
And it’s all a matter of learning, too; you’ll be much more prepared for the Korean release, and then much more prepared for the next big thing… Honestly I’d be shocked if the audiovisual update released on time, no bugs, no complaints, etc., given that you’re, what, one developer?
9 Likes
Yes you’re always learning, this is true. But a little frustration with yourself can also make the lesson stick more
As I’ve said before though, I’ve always imagined this release would be the most difficult and intimidating release I’d have to do, which it has proven to be. So I’m not super surprised.
All the prospective features we’ve laid out (even Korean) should be much smaller and limited in scope.
All in all, I will be so happy to get this out!
8 Likes
I can very relate to this.
I learnt the hard way how to manage a website that got too big before I could grasp myself with the basics.
Just take your time. While I can understand you want to get “rid” of this on the to-do list, managing a bad update is worse than delaying the release.
Also you might want to clone the database and do a beta.learnnatively for people to try break with such major changes.
7 Likes
Not really knowing all the details, but would it make it easier if you just made it a fixed granularity? Just 10%, 20%, 30%, …, 100%? Or even just 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%? (Every episode is only 4 “pages”.)
At least when I plan schedules and budgets, I find it’s easier to keep the numbers simple – easier for both the trackers and the trackees.
2 Likes
Is it really necessary to support partial episode watching? For people who track “days watched” they can still manually mark a day as watched. Is there really any other use case for marking an episode as 10 minutes out of 25 minutes completed?
5 Likes
Yeah I’d lean more towards “partially watched” and “fully watched” states if anything, although I’m sure some people will want down to the minute granularity. I do… But I have a spreadsheet for that level of tracking as I’d hardly expect the site to include YouTube videos, podcasts, audiobook samples, etc
7 Likes
