Re: Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems
Note that voting can have a similar drawback -- in that if you've got
enough like-minded people voting for a particular viewpoint (eg, "Joe
Random sucks, give him what for!") people with a different viewpoint
(eg, "stop berating people, argh") aren't going to bother voting ("the
score's already +50, why bother with a -1?"). This seems to happen on
digg a fair bit. Probably someting to be aware of.
People using the data will set their own interest threshold, just like
you set yourself how much you rely on your spam filter. If the rating
system is to be officially adopted, a per-reader filter threshold will
IMO be a requirement. Therefore, going from +1 to -1 won't make the
message disappear for everyone. It's possible that going from 50 to 49
will hide the message to those with the least interest in the list.
Anyway, it shouldn't take much more time to vote than to look at what
the current score is, so I don't think the term "bother" is adequate.
If what you're fearing is that a "voting majority" would be featured
prominently at the expense of a non-voting minority, it's possible for
the minority to ignore the ratings. The system stays helpful to the
majority.
Anyway, another idea I was pondering, was having "posting credits". Everyone
gets, say, five a month, and whenever they make a post, they use one up. _But_,
everytime you get a reply to a post you made, critical or complimentary, you
get one back.
I don't like this idea. With a good rating system in place, "posting
credits" would be essentially useless. This is some kind of passive
reputation system. The proposal goes beyond a reputation system, with
per-message ratings.
Benefits:
- rate limits people, rather than censoring them. got a lot
to say? if you can say it in one post a week, rather than a hundred,
you're set. if people think you're intersting, it's easy for them
to follow what you've got to say, if people think you're boring,
it's easy to ignore you
Rather than censoring? The only case that could be considered censoring
on Debian mailing lists I can remember is the ban of Sven Luther
announced on http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2007/05/msg00234.html
I requested this ban to be lifted and the only reason this may persist I
can see is the lack of manpower in the mailing lists team.
Furthermore, there would not have been any temptation to ban Sven with a
proper reputation system.
- allows discussions to happen (I say something, you reply, I reply
to you, you reply to me, etc, and I've spent one credit, and we just
keep swapping the other one)
Well, we already have discussions happening...
- discourages people from "feeding the energy beast" -- replying to
trolls then *technically* enables them to post more not just socially
(and likewise prevents you posting on other subjects technically,
not just due to the distraction); so unless you've got something
you *really* want to add, your best way to shut someone stupid up
is just to ignore them (both technically and socially)
I guess you could see it like that. Another way to see this is that
posting credits would be ineffective if people "feed the energy beast".
That said, the main reason I don't like this idea is that I'm very
skeptic that the value of people's post declines past a certain number
of unanswered posts (ignoring spam). I'd like to see statistics or some
supporting evidence.
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