sotto voce

Well, who'd have guessed!

Kapyong

Gday all,

The Amazon forums have a useful mechanism :

Each individual post can be voted on by readers as not contributing to the discussion (essentially a 'dislike' button.)

Once a post reaches a certain number of 'dislikes', it is minimised down to one line so it is not visible. A click can restore it if you really want to read it.

It works quite well, and I think we could try something like that here.


Kapyong

sotto voce

For thugs.

thief of fire

Maybe a good point. But there is a price to pay. I still think it is worth experimenting. Trying it out to see the results.

That is all I am suggesting, determining what actauly works best by trying it, rather than just hypothesising.
This is the strength of science. Testing our ideas.
We could investigate whether ideas work by trying them.

If we do things the way we are doing them, we will get what we have been getting.

Sheshbazzar

Could always go with 'If it ain't broke don't fix it'. Like the poor, the whiners and the complainers we'll always have with us.

stephan huller

it is broke so let's fix it. its become a place filled with graffiti.

sotto voce

For instance:

'Dualism is in the nature of Jewish apocalypticism from which Christianity emerged.'

'If Hebrews relied on the Gospel stories it would reference them.'

'the rest of the forum would have to recite the Nicene Creed'

Pity the reluctant believer. It's a dizzying, yo-yo existence, zooming from skeptic's crap to believer's poopalism, back again, and then back again.

RavenSky

The problem I see with this is that certain people will be routinely reduced to invisibility due to personality differences.

We have an "ignore" feature available. I'm curious why anyone (not you specifically) feels we need some other - public - means of disregarding posts?

If I recall correctly, we also have a formal debate area. Is it possible, if we have 2 or 3 people on a particular thread trying to engage in a rigorous discussion that is being cluttered with derails to request a formal debate thread?

Kapyong

Gday all,

Thanks for your reply RavenSky

Not necessarily. If the dislike count is set right then only worthless posts will become invisible. Posts from infamous posters that actually have some useful content should still be visible. I don't think a large number of people would routinely 'dislike' specific posters just for the sake of it - they have ignore for that.


I don't want to ignore people totally - but I do want to be able to ignore useless posts - the poster will soon get to know which subjects people dislike and hopefully stop posting about them. Worthwhile posts should still be visible.


Formal debates are not as lively as free flowing threads with multiple posters. A certain amount of input from others helps a thread, but my idea would allow the useless posts to be hidden at the individual post level, instead of totally ignoring a person.


Kapyong

Kapyong

Gday all,

What do you mean by that?
Have you seen how it works on Amazon?

I found it worked pretty well, I didn't see any thugs ganging up on people - I saw useless posts made invisibile, while useful ones stayed visible.

Perhaps you could explain your comment ?


Kapyong