To briefly address @757Phan and a few other comments about the Ranker voting system - it's funny, the first incarnation of Ranker (before we had a widget-version) was all about "reranks" and had no vote buttons at all. But we found the addition of the vote buttons scaled participation immensely, and also tended to make our rankings perhaps a bit more democratic (because it allows more casual participation). The ESPN-style reranking can work well for sports lists particularly because they tend to be more finite sets of things that everyone looking at the list has a strong opinion on. Offering a rerank-only version of a Ranker is something that we could do relatively painlessly, indeed it is on our to-do list, tho not at the top. A topic like this might indeed be better served by that. On ranker.com, a lot of our lists are "ultimate lists" - lists that combine both votes and reranks about equally in the algorithm. We do not currently support these in the widget, mainly because when reranks are added to the algo, eyeballing the list and looking at the votes just seems odd and brings up questions (here's an example on one of my personal faves on Ranker.com - Rock Stars Whose Untimely Deaths Left The Most Great Music Behind - notice for example that by eyeballing the votes, Kurt Cobain should be below SRV, Bonzo, and others - but people who rerank the list tend to put him really high (he's my #2 behind Jimi). As an aside about this list, i'm saddened how low Jerry is, as I feel that if had he lived a longer life he would have been like the blues and jazz greats (I know, '94 and '95 were not great examples), but I have found that there is a lot of anti-Dead bias out there in general rock-fan land (some classic rock and metal heads also harbor IMHO outside hatred towards Nirvana and certainly Phish as well). Phew, but i digress - anyhow we are working on some changes to also allow Ultimate Lists to work as widgets and that might work better for this particular community.

A few more quick points - first, this list is interesting in that there is a huge level of voter participation @bertoletdown says over 50% of visitors have voted), but only about a 3-1 votes/voters ratio, which is quite low by Ranker standards. My guess is that many of the visitors to this thread caught one or two shows, and have maybe listened to a few other jams, and therefore wouldn't be likely at all to do a proper rerank of a "top 10" or whatever length, the way a hardcore tour head can. After all, there are probably 5+ hours of jams on this list. I have a feeling that rankings like these will continue to grow over time - i personally plan to check out all of these jams at some point when i'm working on a Sunday, and vote on them all accordingly, or rerank at that time. So the voting interface allows more casual participation, which we feel strongly is a good thing.

Lastly, there's the question of "what are you voting on" ie should you be thumbs-downing something you think is too high on the list, or are you thumbs-downing it because it doesn't belong on the list at all? That is a very good question, and honestly the answer is - voting is in the eye of the beholder. Myself and my team have spent many many hours wrestling with this question, and the reality is, this interface is used for many different types of rankings on just about every topic on the planet. We decided - after a lot of testing - to decide not to define this. You may well feel this is a bit of a cop-out, and that would be fair criticism, and I'm more than happy to hear other thoughts about this topic, though I probably won't respond in the next week as I'm taking my first week of vacation in 5 years, ha.

As a closing thought to what is now a ridiculously long post (thx for listening), please feel free to keep the constructive comments coming on this thread or hopefully future Rankings. I think opinion-based rankings are the best possible "filters" for topics like this and have put everything I have into building a tool to support this and just want to make it the best it can be.