In its current form, the Popular Highlights feature is far too sensitive to be useful. It appears to work with as few as 5 people marking a book. This can create clutter, such as the following paragraph, where nearly every sentence is underlined.
I have 2 suggestions for how to make this display of popular highlights more meaningful and readable:
- Base the minimum number of highlights on the total number of users who have marked up a particular book or even a section of a book. So if 20 people mark up a book, I would not consider 5 users to be particularly "popular". This is only 25% of those who marked the book, so it is actually not very popular. I would want to see no less than 50% or perhaps even 75% users to consider a mark up "popular". So if 100 people marked up the books, if the threshold were set to 50%, at least 50 people would have to highlight a phrase to make it "popular". This dynamic popular highlighting would result in a more meaningful result than the present markup.
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Allow the user to specify in settings a minimum number of
highlights to display popular highlights. This could be a raw number of a
percentage. Perhaps the Settings could allow the following options for popular highlights: Automatic [default]; 90%; 75%; 65% 50%; 25%; Don't Display.
In addition, as I have suggested elsewhere, I would like a less obtrusive indicator of the number of highlights than "[5 highlights]". This seriously disrupts the readability of the text. A small, unobtrusive number would be better for reading.
