Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems
On Sunday 21 December 2008 23:12:08 Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:35:14AM +0000, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> > Now, I know that for a bunch of geeks like us it is very tempting to
> > start discussing the technical details and how the scoring is
> > going to be implemented, and how the results are going to be used,
> > and so on. The way I would like to see this idea developing is that it
> > starts as an unofficial project, with very simple rules (like, "you
> > can vote once for each message ID"), which simply collects the data
> > and makes it publicly available in some way. Interested parties and
> > individuals can then use the data to provide their own metrics (and
> > try to convince others that their way of calculating the mailing list
> > "karma" is the right one). Eventually, we should be able to settle on
> > one authoritative way of calculating it, which can become "official",
> > and used to develop procedures for warning the offensive posters that
> > their behaviour is considered disruptive, for example.
>
> To reiterate my point from IRC Friday, I don't think the described system
> is at all useful *unless* we agree on a means by which strong community
> disapproval of the poster's mails has consequences for that person's
> posting privileges. I think by this point, the people whose mails I
> disapprove of know it ;), so what's the benefit to me in spending time
> ranking their mails in a system that's advisory?
While you clearly know whether you approve or disapprove a given message, what
you don't know or can't be 100% sure is whether your decision belongs to the
subset of the majority or to the subset of the minority, thus having the "big
picture" would address that at some point (i.e. one's own decision could be
very wrong whether another's message is good or bad). In that case peer's
decision would be corrected by the community.
> Furthermore, there are built-in rewards for people to continue posting,
> despite knowing that some number of developers disapprove of their posts:
>
> - it gives them an opportunity to try to persuade the "audience" of
> undecideds
> - it increases the chances that the disapprovers will give up and go away,
> which can be seen as a "win" if the disapproval is mutual
> - it gives them a chance to have the last word
This is possible indeed, and I guess the community may want to vote in order
to decide what to do with such a case. I think I prefer the system to be
advisory by default, and only extremely severe cases to be decided (voted?)
on a case-by-case basis by the community.
--
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB 2003-03-18 <people.fccf.net/danchev/key pgp.mit.edu>
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