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brainiac
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 p.2 #9 · Canon Forum Atmosphere | |
The suggestion about moderators is a very good one, but I have seen many people complaining about moderators, and moderators sometimes get a lot of flack. They are also human, and they err. They have to do a lot of work to keep track of what is going on in busy fora. In an ideal world a socratic moderator would do a perfect job, but what we are seeing here is that this ideal way of doing things is not happening. FM isn't a big site, but I am sure we would all like it to grow, harmoniously, so it would do well to look carefully at how very longstanding fora, like slashdot, handle this thorny problem. A well designed peer moderation system massively reduces the work of moderators, who then don't need to monitor every thread.
> No, Brainiac, I don't like the concept of up/down voting. It really nets you nothing in the long run other than people attempting to score higher.
Guess that's a -1 then ;-)
People scoring higher is good. That means others liked what they read enough to bother to vote for it. These fora thrive on the invaluable advice of experienced people who kindly share their knowledge. I don't believe trolls, flamers, and bores will achieve high scores, so high scores will mean valuable content, by consensus. Like slashdot, you can always read at -1 if you feel the low scorers have a lot to contribute.
I have written forum code in the past where the contrast of comment text from the background increased or decreased according to score. That makes it very easy to see high scoring posts at a glance, while still providing full access to the lower scores for the interested. In my view it could work very well, increase the quality of content, even in the Canon forum, speed up the server by attenuating comment noise, and especially reduce the number of posts which say simply 'I agree/don't agree'.
An attractive side effect of a simple +1/-1 vote per comment per member would be that each thread would have a net score. Flamewars would probably end up with negative net scores. Tenacious and interesting threads would probably end up with highly positive net scores, even if there were disagreement. Net thread score would be another helpful indicator of the value of a thread alongside number of comments and number of views.
To those who object to this scheme being implemented, I would like to ask, how can it detract? After all, nothing that is here now would disappear, with the possible exception that there might be a slight reduction in the already few abusive, ill-humoured, boring or uninformative. Remember, nobody has to vote, and nobody need heed the scores.
Edited on Feb 01, 2008 at 07:15 AM
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| Feb 01, 2008 at 07:04 AM |
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Then someone with good karma is known as a good poster and someone with a poor karma is a nitwit?
Take that back!