Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
I read the OP as saying the votes would be removed if someone posts in a thread they voted in.
Nothing stops me from posting and getting 5 or 6 buddies to vote for me...
Has anyone here read the Dr. Seuss story, on the two warring factions, one that prefers that their bread is butter-side up, and one that prefers their butter-side down? (
link)
I wonder how much of these features would be more of an enabling tool-set to even more polarize some of the forums, and make it more of a "vote scoring competition"?
Personally, I don't really like Slashdot. I'm sort of an obsessively thorough person, so I read at 0, because more often than not, besides the flames and some trolling that happens (which I can simply choose to personally ignore), I also find some interesting gems, which more often than not, were simply unpopular or even un-viewed/modded statements, that never got boosted. (Often AC posts that start at zero, and are filted out by the default viewing level, so no-one sees them, but the "bottom feeder-readers" like myself reading at zero.)
It would seem to be both more of a popularity contest, as well as enabling sort of a democratic hive-mind control over the content, in which only the popular viewpoints survive, and unpopular/minority ones are collectively silenced.
So I think that in order for any such sort of changes to suceed, one needs to clearly define the
purpose behind those changes first. Are they intended to:
1) rate/score threads for posterity, in order to
--1a) ensure their priority in terms of being archived, and
--1b) permit them to be more easily accessed, by those viewing/reading the archived posts? (View posts by score/ranking)
2) filter collective discussion viewpoints, in order to
--2a) silence or otherwise lower the visibility to readers of unpopular viewpoints
--2b) enhance the visibility of popular viewpoints, to increase the chance of a maximally-coherent discussion outcome?
In other words, this would tend to increase conformity (the Slashdot hive-mind effect), and suppress minority opinions. Yet, I find that those exact sort of disparate viewpoints often generate the most interesting discussions, almost like a both strongly-damped and strongly-driven chaotic system. Is it preferred to have the outcome of discussions "stable" or "chaotic"? (In a non-linear-dynamics sort of sense, applied as an analogy to human discussion contexts.)
3) collectively filter out certain individual's posts, essentially turning the forums into almost a "popularity contest"? Would/should this be because of:
--3a) their viewpoints? or
--3b) because they post things that are considered to be unacceptable by the community; spam, trolling, etc. (I think that could/should be handled by moderation.)
4) Allow more efficient or effective self-moderation/collective-moderation, to decrease the need for dedicated administration resources over the community discussion?
5) Because AT wants to be like Slashdot (or insert name of other collective-voting discussion site here)?
6) Simply because "The Boss" said so.. and as it was written, so shall it be done!
Btw, how will this all interact with allowing post editing? Has that been considered at all? What happens if someone posts a "collectively-popular opinion" piece, and it gets voted up, and then the poster changes it to something else? Or deletes the info?
A simplistic solution would be to disallow editing once a post had been voted upon, but what if someone posts something with an error, and someone else happens to read it just as it was posted, and votes on it (since it bumps to the top of the "recent posts" view list), and now the poster cannot edit it?
What about allowing a user to vote
down their own posts - if they decide that their post was perhaps rather non-useful, or they don't want it archived, or something? What about a user's ability to delete their own post entirely, either because of the former reasons, or because they simply double-posted? (Perhaps there should be a double-post filter?)
Likewise, I can imagine what might happen in the technical forums, in terms of posts getting voted up/down, depending on the popularity of the product that they are discussing? (The current threads about the origin and nature of the Ultra X-Connect PSUs come to mind here.)
I'm glad that this is being looked into (mostly), because it's a non-trivial change, but I would prefer that it be thought out and done "right" (if such a thing is possible), with long-term goals in mind.
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