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votes
Suggestions from a new user
Hi all. Registered several days ago and this is my first post.
After reading around this group and the blog, I'm very excited for the tildes project. It's not just another reddit-style forum but actually one of its own taste and style. I have some suggestions for the project and would like to share them with the community. They are the result of years of redditing with numerous frustrating experiences and few shower thoughts.
- Voting power should not be taken for granted. The ability for me to vote must be in some way tied to my contributions to the discussion. This can be implemented in a sort of formula that takes into account the user's 'score' and 'activity' which results in a finite number of votes at the user's disposal. The more you contribute the more voting power you get, and the more quality you provide in your contributions the more votes you get to use.
- Deleted posts or comments must be reflected in a user's score. One of the bad effects of having a user score is the tendency to 'karma whore' in order to increase that score no matter what. The result is low effort posts and comments. Having a system in place that removes from the user's score if their posts/comments get deleted would act as a constant reminder to the minimum level of quality required.
- Mods should not have dictator power over their groups. Sure they must have elevated accounts to run their groups, including the power to remove or ban, but they should not be invisible. There has to be an approved system where users can have the collective power to revoke the elevated account powers of a Mod if they reach a certain threshold. Not sure how to implement this exactly, may be through voting by the users of a group who have high scores or reputations. One of the cancerous ailments of reddit is the invincibility of Mods.
- The availability of formatting tools and embedding in posts. This is 2018 and inserting a photo, video, table in the body of a post should be easily implemented. Constrictions on the use of certain attention-grabbing formats (eg. large fonts, ascii art, emoji) should be also be implemented to deter low effort contributions.
Here's to hoping this project flourishes into a much-needed hub for quality content and discussions on the internet.
Cheers
Edit: Not sure why the first point is indented or how to fix it.
Edit2: Fixed.
Welcome, and thanks for the feedback. You should probably read this page on the Docs site that discusses the "trust" system that we hope to implement. I think that will cover (or at least help a lot with) your first 3 points: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future
As for #4, I highly doubt that I'll ever allow people to include images or videos directly in their posts. That's how you end up with "discussions" being entirely made up of people posting reaction gifs at each other. Other than that, we're using markdown for formatting and tables will definitely be supported before too long (when I get around to enabling the markdown extensions).
For the strange list/indentation in your post, just remove the double line breaks between items - there should only be one line break between each item and then it will format into a list properly.
Hi Deimos, thanks for replying to my post.
I read the Mechanics post and love the 'Trust' concept. Users would build up their 'Trust' value with consistent contribution and accountability (ie. how much they are active and the quality of their activity measures by the votes they get). Also love that this 'Trust' value will be group specific and is subject to decrease over time. I didn't read anything though related to the concept of voting being a finite entity. My suggestion including making voting a finite asset that should not be taken for granted. Users would have a finite number of votes they can use depending on their Trust value. I think this will help in guaranteeing that the most voted post/comment really deserve their top positions and thus raise the level of Quality overall.
I didn't get the "Increased punishment effectiveness" section. What do you mean by "established accounts can be far more capable than brand new ones"? I mean, this can relate perfectly to my suggestion of limiting the number votes for example, if by "more capable" you mean more number of votes.
The reputation system for moderation sounds very promising, but a bit thin on details. I understand these are yet to be implemented systems, I'm just concerned about the existence of some sort of mechanic that would keep Mods in check and prevent them from abusing their elevated power.
One point that's missing is point #2. How would a removed/deleted post/comment be reflected in a user's Trust value? My view is that it should be waivered accordingly. If a users gets votes for a post that later gets proven to be misleading or false, they should lose the equivalent of the amount of Trust they gained from posting said post.
I get your stance on media usage in posts, although I feel it would be a wasted opportunity. Embedding photos and videos (gifs) is a tool that can be used with a lot of benefit in enriching post that require graphs, charts, maps, footage, or illustrations for example. It would certainly make Tildes more pleasing to browse if used correctly, which is something the community should be able to moderate.
I'll fix the indentation error I have in my original post.
This is a fairly common suggestion, but in general, I don't like the idea of restricting how often people can vote. What if one day there are multiple exceptionally good threads? You can't vote in all of them because you don't have enough votes? I think it would have far too strong of a chilling effect on voting because people won't want to "waste" their votes in case they need them for something better later.
Restricted voting is useful in cases where you want the users to specifically make choices. For example, UserVoice (a site where users suggest changes to sites) has restricted voting and it's useful there—it forces the users to decide which changes are the most important to them. That doesn't really apply to voting on comments though. We've talked a bit about a special "exemplary vote" that would be limited, and people would specifically try to only apply to things that they think are exceptionally high-quality posts.
People that have built up a higher level of trust would have access to stronger tools (such as comment tagging), and probably also have their votes weighted higher than brand new ones.
Yes, deleting posts shouldn't remove negative effects from them.
I think you can get more insight on the discussions that already appeared in the past days. For voting (1), you can go here. The main topic is not what yoh proposed, but there was some similar discussion in the comments that deal with something similar. I remember someone arguing limiting votes, let me know if you can't find it so I can dig deeper.
Regarding karma (2),you can find some related discussion here. I think the idea is to delete all data regarding submissions, votes and karma after a while. I personally don't agree with penalizing user's reputation when deleting comments. And in any case, I don't see how that relates to karma-whoring.
I think your point (3) is discussed in the docs about trusted users, although there was some discussion about moderation and curation. Maybe it was in the first link I gave you, but I don't really remember.
Regarding (4), I personally wouldn't like to see embedded images, gifs or emoji of any kind.I think the potential for enriching is outweighed by the potential for derailing and polluting. Also, I believe the goal is to focus on reasoned, well-thought and detailed content, mostly in text format. Sure, an image or a graph might be very helpful in sustaining an argument, but you can always link to a gif/image/video, there is no need to have it embedded.
A different thing would be to use embedded thumbnails or images on submission listings, that might be a better idea. But I think using them in comments is not suitable to the objectives of the site. (In my opinion, of course)