First, just let me say that I think that frivolous threads can be just fine and that it is often okay to not add that much value to threads. I will now be talking about more serious discussion threads.
Glademaster said:
Have you ever heard anyone say you are never the only one? The answer to that is probably yes and it is true you are never the only one. There will always be someone in a thread who has a striking similar opinion to you. Not posting because of that to me seem a tad stupid. You are on a forum you are supposed to be putting ideas across and even if you realise half way through your argument your original ideas was flawed you might learn something from another view point. (snip)
AWDMANOUT said:
Well, I dunno... Everybody has a different opinion. Even if that opinion only varies in a slightly different way, its still different. Anything anyone says is usually valuable, (snip)
I disagree. In fact, I think that if you post in these threads without adding anything original, it is very likely that you are removing value from the thread. This is because it takes people time to read what you wrote. In this thread we have also seen that a lot of people who tend to read all preceding posts in a thread (a.k.a. the (only) people that you actually want to post) will skip long threads, because it takes too much of a time investment.
If what you are writing doesn't differ from what someone else has written, you are just wasting people's time and scaring intelligent people off. If it differs a little, quote the opinion(s) that have already been stated and just say how yours differs (and probably why). Ask yourself "am I posting to add new insights to the thread, or to sate my desire to participate?". If the answer is just the latter, it is probably best to refrain from posting.
sir.rutthed said:
Jordi said:
I think I've found my soulmates in this thread. When I contribute to a meaningful conversation I always read all prior posts. When it becomes apparent that most other people don't, it annoys me. For this reason I tend to avoid long threads. I have often thought of how a forum could be made that basically forces people to only contribute something meaningful or stfu (I dabble in web development).
But it can also be nice to have "smalltalk" topics where people just post to have a pleasant conversation with one another. Both kinds of topics are nice to have, but I think problems occur when some people want to have a serious discussion, while others are just trying to make smalltalk.
I'd be interested in seeing how a web developer would approach this situation. Certainly there's a time and place for everyone posting whatever they want with no discretion, but I can't imagine moderators will always be the only answer for moderating posts.
Small disclaimer: I'm not so much a web developer as I am someone who has done some web developing (i.e. not a professional). Also, I don't have yet been able to solve the problem completely (even in my head), and it is highly doubtful that my theories would do anything but harm.
Let's start with the observation that you can only add something new to a thread if it has not been stated before. The only way to know for sure that something hasn't been stated before is to read all of the posts in a thread before replying. So we want to enforce that a poster actually did that.
Completely 100% enforcing that will be very hard, but I think an approximation is possible. We know reading takes time, so we can count the number of posts/words/characters in a thread and multiply that by some number of (milli)seconds, and require the time between loading a page and posting to be at least that. Of course this system can be cheated by just loading a page and go doing something else for a while, but that would still take some foresight on the part of the user in addition to some time investment. Furthermore, it might be possible to implement something like this on a per post base, so that you can't read two posts in an impossibly fast succession. Of course the system should underestimate reading time somewhat, so that even fast readers don't notice this policy at all as long as they actually read everything.
I think it would definitely be possible to implement this feature, although it might make the forum less user friendly (i.e. likely either longer loading times or the requirement that JavaScript is on).
Of course, once somebody is allowed to post, it is kind of hard to automatically moderate what that person says. This will probably be a problem mostly at the start of threads, because the time investment required to post is still pretty low in the beginning. This is a much, much harder problem. Maybe very advanced AI algorithms can help to solve this automatically, but I don't really want to get into that here and I doubt it would even be possible to do anything satisfactory anytime soon.
Unfortunately, I don't have an automatic solution for moderating the actual content of posts. In order to discourage posts that don't add any real value, you probably need to punish those posters somehow. Normally we have moderators for that, but the goal of this thought experiment is to limit their workload as much as possible. I think that with the right features, a lot of the work can be outsourced to the community. Basically they would have to vote on the arguments that they read in other posts.
I would very much like to add a feature where it becomes possible to label separate arguments in a post. You could then for instance use labels like "agree", "disagree", "inappropriate", and "this is not original" (possibly followed by a required reference to the original). If enough people vote that something is not original, some action can be taken. For instance, that argument can be hidden from view, and the poster can be punished either directly or by a moderator (that was alerted) in order to prevent abuse of this feature by people who simply disagree with something.
Since we need the community to do something, it is necessary to provide some incentive. We can either do this by rewards (karma or something) or by simply requiring it as part of the "you have to read it anyway before you post"-policy. We could make this stuff even more draconian (and "correct") by punishing wrongly assigned (or unassigned) unoriginal/inappropriate labels. Wrongness can either be determined by a moderator or by a majority vote or something. I'd like to call these concepts "duty" and "responsibility" (for your actions), but I realize they are actually pretty harsh.
I said earlier that you can only add something
new if someone hasn't already said it, but that actually isn't the only way to add value. Another way is by saying whether you agree with something or not, because it may be interesting to know how people are divided. But reading all of these posts takes time, and it can be hard to tally them in your head, so I think that being able to label separate arguments with a (dis)agree vote is a really nice way of removing these (mostly empty) posts, while still giving people the ability to contribute.
These things can of course also be applied to entire posts, but since a lot of them make several points, I think it is important to be able to (dis)agree with them separately. I think I would implement this by letting people highlight sets of whole sentences and determining a label for those.
Of course, this all asks a lot of effort from the community. If we still decide to have moderators, I don't know if this will be much more effective than the "report" buttons that a lot of forums have now. If we decide to have (almost) no moderators, the community gets a lot of power and they need to use that responsibly.
I think that's pretty much it. If anyone actually read this far, thinks this is interesting and finds something unclear, don't hesitate to ask. I would also find it very interesting to hear other people's opinions on this.
