Post History

What distinguishes us from a blog is mostly the scores on the posts. That's one of our main advantages for people seeking quality content: they have a rough measure of the average interested internet user's opinion of the post.

We are going to import content. To throw away useful information about that content is doing a disservice to our readers. That's why we should keep votes.

Is there any downside to keeping votes?

Almost none. The only downside is with the signal there is also noise. This is true of all signals. This noise takes a few forms:

 + Double voting: a user may have voted for a post on Mi Yodeya and vote again here. Inaccurate signal.

 + Calibration: scores at Mi Yodeya are generated over a certain user base and time period. Scores on native posts will be generated over a different user base and time period. Thus a score of 10 may have different meanings depending on the origin of the post.

 + Differing standards: a post on Mi Yodeya was judged on its scope and quality standards, while posts here are to be judged on our scope and quality standards.

The question for us is: **is this noise significantly outside the margin of error of our native signal generation?**

To me the answer is clearly no. For two reasons: the noise isn't that bad, and our native signal isn't that noiseless.

 + Double voting is a realistic concern for only a handful of users and if they are so inspired by a post to reach for the upvote button twice, it's probably worth it.

 + Scores at Mi Yodeya hovered in the 1-15 range mostly. A few weeks on this site already has a number of posts up at +7. I see no reason to expect the ranges to overlap reasonably soon. (See below about extreme cases.)

 + No one as far as I know has yet suggested any scope or quality standard which would be stricter than Mi Yodeya's. In other words, if a post was of good quality there, we can be confident it will be here too. (The inverse doesn't hold.) If we exclude some specific set of questions (eg. product recommendation questions) we can always remove questions with that tag later.

In addition to all of that, our native signal generation will not be perfect. There will be random questions that get more views for some reason, even if it's not because of SE's Hot Network Questions. And there will be good posts that fly under the radar for whatever reason. It happens. You can't get worked up about a random few vote points. Plus many of our initial users will not want to go back and reread all the Mi Yodeya content they already read once to regenerate the original signal.

Thus it is worth bringing over the scores with the posts.

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My only caveat is some extremely highly voted posts on Mi Yodeya which, while not really harmful there, we may as well scale down a bit. I'll propose different fudge factors in different answers, though the details don't really matter all that much (noise margin of error, etc.)

Vote here if you support the general idea.