all 20 comments

[–]SeasideLimbs 9 insightful - 2 fun9 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 2 fun -  (6 children)

Good suggestions, especially about transparent moderation. One thing though, I think if sorting by "old" was the default, people would just keep switching back to "best." I don't know if it would accomplish anything other than annoy people.

Offtopic: Anyone else miss bulletin board forums? They felt so cozy compared to all the stuff we have now. Web 1.0 in general, really.

[–]uwubunny[S] 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Very much Web 1.0 person here.

The sort ordering matters a lot on Reddit-like fora. Whatever you sort by, you incentivize. If you sort by old, you incentivize hair trigger, low-effort replies. If you sort by New, you incentivize trying to get the last word in. If you sort by Best, you incentivize trying to appeal to lowest common denominator. What I want to explore is how to get away from the groupthink that murdered Reddit.

On image boards, if posts have a lot of replies, you'll find them quickly by scanning the thread. They don't discriminate between posts that get positive or negative attention, and I don't think that's a bad thing - provided you've got some tolerance for controversy.

If your site encourages people to just read the top posts in any meaningful ordering, you're putting repliers and people who make late, thoughtful posts, at a disadvantage. Ordering by old forces everyone to at least skim everything. That additional work that everyone has to do to interact with the board is what encourages everyone else to contribute. It also doesn't work for anything over a few hundred posts.

If you're determined to sort by "what people agree with", the best way to do this would be to treat it like a multi-armed bandit problem, with an algorithm to boost new comments to determine how good they are. I think HN does this.

[–]Papitas 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

How about random sorting, then? That would kind of iron out those kind of biases.

[–]uwubunny[S] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Has anyone built a forum with a random or stochastic sort order? Plus, it's not clear to me how it would work in a threaded conversation.

It's about incentives. The reason I'm replying to you is that I believe that people will read it - chasing the dopamine hit of getting interaction, upvotes and replies, and ultimately the belief that I'm influencing other people by some absolutely tiny amount. If you think internet points are better, you should design to maximize the chance that I'll vote your comment up. If you think replies are better, design to maximize the chance that I'll reply.

[–]JasonCarswell 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

I like the old bulletins. I also like some other forum formats and their nifty features better. I really like the QxR forum for torrents, though I don't know what it was. Other forums just don't have the great content though.

[–]JasonCarswell 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Read the FAQ: https://saidit.net/wiki/index/

Mods are limited to 40 subs max to avoid "power-mods". All mod actions (not PMs) are 100% transparent so you can see how trigger happy they are.

I believe all mods should be considered innocent until proven guilty no matter how many subs they have. Mods are only a problem when they abuse their power. I "collect" subs in order to update their banners and CSS (I'd be happy with a theme-moderator status with simpler batch CSS updating). I also create subs because I want a topical place to post in considering there is no organization, categorization, nor metatags. Also I don't care about sub-communities so much as SaidIt as a whole (because I was never a Redditor). I don't moderate anyone except for obvious ads, though I will call out poor behaviour whether I'm a mod or not - as should we all as this SaidIt community is all of our responsibility, and if you don't think so then you're part of the problem that let Reddit die.

I also have huge issues with the limits of the voting (quantity not quality like IMDb 1-10) and extant SaidIt systems inherited from the old open Reddit code, but I also love this place. Without a team of coders there are serious limits to how much can be modified.

One thing I would like to see is "be notified about tree" for lack of a better phrase. At present you can post or comment and people can respond and leave a comment. Your messages ONLY show the direct child comment, not the second or third or forked comments below. Maybe you want to be kept up to date on EVERYTHING that happens under a/your post, but at present the only way you can is to keep manually checking back.

IMO, what is upvoted is like the results in a fishing net, some things are okay so they got some votes and some things are a great catch - but soooooo many of the great catches slipped away unnoticed.

[–]m68k 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

I tend to sort by new.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Me too. Mostly the place i live in.

[–]censorshipment 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Agree, although I prefer to sort by New unless I'm hours late to a thread and enthusiastically want to read all comments (which is rare).

[–]grace 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I remember there was this table that was getting posted a couple of months back that listed the 50 most popular subs and the moderators of said subs. There were only like 20 different accounts and anyone that re-posted that table got banned

[–]kokolokoNightcrawler 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Every sub has a public moderation log. Look on the right side

[–]philosopher 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I do take your point, although I find sorting by popularity to be useful. I also kind of want low upvoted posts to be occasionally thrown up into the mix of highly upvoted posts so people see them and get a chance to vote them up too. I know this maybe isn't the same point that you're making.

[–]uwubunny[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

We can do that with a HN-type algorithm that weights new posts up to determine their value ("multi armed bandit").

But I also want to point out that I don't want to just show people posts that they like and agree with. It seems to me that leads to an unhealthy political climate. It's about what we think the function of a forum ought to be. We ought to be exposed to opposing views. That's why the image board structure can be more democratic and reflects public opinion better. Public opinion does have racism, extreme nationalism, hatred, and lots of other things we find unpleasant in it. That's life.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

You can look at: https://saidit.net/new/

And you can see the quality is just not as high as the front page. The votes are useful for finding higher-quality content, even if those vote systems are sometimes hijacked to push propaganda, it's still a net benefit. I have wondered what saidit would be like with no votes at all, but I do think it would be a bit boring. People stopped using the old forum designs for a reason, even though they do have their benefits too.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

The classic forum format pushed a meld of popular/controversial/new to the top since it was based on most recent post descending. I ran several largely uncensored old style forums over the years, and miss them in a various ways.

Since controversial content stayed on top and people felt obligated to read/reply to posts that had a load of responses, these sorts of forums rapidly lost favor as alternatives like reddit and facebook promised to surround people with only those that agree with them. Most people are more comfortable in an echo chamber, and in those sorts of pre "social media" forums there were constant calls to ban people that frequently posted divisive content, or the divisive topics themselves.

[–]magnora7 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yeah but in a way it just changes the brigading tactics from fake upvotes to fake comments, to ensure the threads they want stay at the top. In the end it can still be gamed the same way

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

No doubt, however - those sorts of forums can't really scale to tens of thousands of active users. It just ends up being a confusing blend of things constantly vanishing off page 1. As a result of the diminished number of users forum sliding efforts were generally easy to spot and less successful.

Sliding is still very much a thing on image-boards.

[–]72ndGender 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

One thing I like about the downvote function, is it tips me off to where the best comments are. I never pass up the chance to expand a heavily downvoted post.

[–]catoboros 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

The old Reddit FAQ described upvotes as for interesting or constructive contributions, not just those with which one agrees. Using upvotes for agreement is a feedback loop that has led to subreddits becoming echo chambers.

[–]uwubunny[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

People will naturally use upvotes to reward opinions they like and punish those they don't. How do you make fora robust to the tendency?