ChristopherM
Hey, Ryan - How did you determine that I was working against you? You may or may not know that Nosedive is a cautionary parable about what goes wrong when an algorithmic rating system is too thoroughly and rigorously applied. It is, of course, fiction. I referenced it because the Bakery's rating scheme appears to have that kind of rigidity and therefore I am concerned that it will over-react. The present forum thankfully only allows soft censorship - posts can be marked as helpful and people can support or criticise ideas without fear of being disappeared. A user can block any other user without that affecting anybody else. If someone acts grossly against the forum guidelines, they may be banned only after review by a human being, but that is rightly a last resort. All of this appears to work. Automating it and locking it to a rigid scheme sounds like a backward step to me. I am not working against you - I am just articulating a concern. , and unfortunately the tenor of your response heightens my concern. Would my signal be regarded as noise in your new scheme?
Thanks Christopher for elaborating further. This
is helpful feedback and when expressed in more detail makes much more sense to me. Right now nothing is overly aggressive and, as I was mentioning, we may tweak things as we go and I anticipate that this will be the case. We don't have any real feedback to go off yet though so it's difficult to say with any guarantee if we did a good job initially at setting up the system. The goal is definitely not to punish anyone and, if anything, is more focused on allowing us to relate whether or not Ideas and Answers to questions are good ones that are resulting in a positive outcome. We realize our posters are human beings and don't want a machine to dictate whether or not they're viewed as valuable.
I guess to explain my remark about working against us, I
did say the signal and rewards were a work in progress, but since you said you didn't have the time to read my post in it's entirety, the feedback seemed like a stab at me and my attempt at explaining something. If you have a bad feeling, than my hope was to try to address it with my post, not have it glossed over and then have another member mark an indirect response as helpful without any insight as to why until I brought it up.
I guess, in other words, when we try to engage and users end up tallking to each-other
around/about us, it doesn't seem as productive.
It's going to be difficult to discuss any of the merits of the system until some people spend some time with it, which is definitely what I encourage. I'm sure bugs will be pointed out, concerns will be raised, and we'll address them to the best of our ability.