I downloaded the 1625 shots in FF between Aug 24 (#176473) and Sep 24 (#182451). For them the ratings and number of solves count are closed.
Mean value of the ratings = 7.785
Here is the graph of the ratings versus number of solves. You can notice a strong correlation ! A shot having only 1 solve has an expected rating of 7.2 while it is above 8 for a shot with 1000+ solves.
I have also checked some popular tags and computed the mean rating of the shots tagged with the following words:
About the nudity shots I do not agree to a certain point as well, because they usually get instantly around 2-5 favs in most of the cases (if they aren't completely cheap shots). This also helps you to get your shots into the FF pretty often.
Maybe the number of favs should be taken into consideration as well to make this work more significant, what do you think?
Very interesting efji. Being indeed very interested in statistics, I wonder if you could also show the t-value of your regression. It seems there is heteroskedasticity in the data, meaning the variance is much higher on the left side of your graph than on the right side. So it's possible the correlation isn't statistically significant.
You are right @fungus. It should be considered. For the above regression t=16. If I do not take into consideration very low and very high ratings (<6 and >9) that correspond to awesome uploads that I cannot detect automatically, then I get this plot, with t=19 and a correllation even stronger between log(number of solves) and ratings