<Peak Oil Overview - June 2008 (Pdf and Powerpoint available) The Oil Drum DrumBeat: June 27, 2008>

77 comments on Poll: What do you think of the comment rating system?

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Hans Blix on June 26, 2008 - 10:58pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I preffered the first one, where you clicked on the arrows. This one has radio buttons and makes the page refresh. That's not good for thoes of us with a slow connection.

Besides the technical, the system just seems to be a way of voting down people who don't agree with the regulars. I already see TOD as starting to become elitist and narrow-minded. This anonymous 'comment judge' is just going to make it worse.

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Egregius on June 27, 2008 - 6:27am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Agreed. I think it's a dangerous change most likely encouraging group-think. In the thread above this one I already saw an example of a post being voted down because it ran against conventional wisdom, though I thought the arguments made interesting and reasonable. If people actively get judged on their contributions, they're bound to either become conscious of what other people think of them, or revel in being independent of it. This leads to people adjusting their posts for social acceptance, or people rebelling, gleeful at their opposition to the 'mainstream' (I'm thinking of InfinitePossibilities as a poster here).

I prefer contributions to be attacked or supported on their factual merit through reasoned replies, not the emotional agreement it induces from a self-organising baseline group via a rating system.

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Yerk on June 27, 2008 - 10:52am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Promoting group-think will be the most likely outcome. TOD already has some pretty strong "mainstream" believes like ELM and the mainstream does not like to be challenged.

Does an up / down vote mean?
- I like / dislike the style the argument was brought forward - down with inappropriate jokes from intercultural trolls
- I like / dislike what the author is saying content-wise - down with global warming is caused by humans deniers
- I like / dislike the amount of time and thinking the author has invested to present new analysis or comments - down with people writing brief messages without giving all the details

The point-system brings simplicity to a rather complex matter. But, I will immediately endorse it, if someone were to proof that humans are very good in immediately understanding new solutions to complex problems they have so far not really understood, joyfully abandoning the simplistic solutions they used beforehand to endow themselves with a sense of control in a complex world...

If the system were to deal only with "ettiquette", eg style and politeness of the text written, that might be helpful. But keep in mind as Luhmann pointed out, one should never infer the validity of the content from the validity of the form.

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Grautr on June 28, 2008 - 5:47am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Well said,
I notice the conucopians very quickly build up negative feedback which might well put them off from posting again.
Although I dont agree with them on most points I would still prefer that they did not feel in anyway intimidated about posting.

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Leanan on June 27, 2008 - 6:36am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Yeah, making the page refresh is PITA, even for people with fast connections, because it nukes all the "new" flags.

Though I suppose it has the benefit of making sure you don't rate a post unless it's really important to you.

The ratings are anonymous to avoid retaliation - downrating all of someone else's posts because they downrated yours. And vice-versa, I suppose - uprating someone's post because they uprated yours.

Though perhaps a better way of dealing with that would be to limit the number of comments each user can rate per day, to force people to be more thoughtful in how they rate posts.

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77 comments on Poll: What do you think of the comment rating system?

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