Making Facepunch better - Don't post about ratings
5,003 replies, posted
[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;48154079]After my break from FP I noticed that MD was pretty much a dustbowl and that sucks yo. MD was pretty fun and was pretty reasonable and lovely.
However with ratings off in SH I don't think it will turn into MD.
I hope though that some ratings do stay and yes I know I did say ratings off would be good and yeah I should of mentioned some of them not all.[/QUOTE]
Trying MD rules in SH for a while wouldn't be a bad idea, although it would seriously damage Facepunch's pun output.
[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;48154079]After my break from FP I noticed that MD was pretty much a dustbowl and that sucks yo. MD was pretty fun and was pretty reasonable and lovely.
However with ratings off in SH I don't think it will turn into MD.
I hope though that some ratings do stay and yes I know I did say ratings off would be good and yeah I should of mentioned some of them not all.[/QUOTE]
My approach would be all ratings stay, mods tell people to not take shit seriously and watch SH go back in a frenzy, it's fun to watch at times. Mods stated they won't pick and choose, so it's all or nothing. And to be honestly, it should be all.
[QUOTE=DrTaxi;48154003]That's not how "why reply" is used in my experience.[/QUOTE]
'Why reply' is a really counterproductive post, such as going into a thread and saying "how is this news" or opening a thread about cats and saying "dogs are the best, fuck cats"
[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;48154096]Yeah I think that's reasonable. You don't know till you try it. So ratings disabled trial is a good idea. We gotta try these things to know what kind of an affect it will have. If people REALLY REALLY don't like it, can always revert it.[/QUOTE]
Ratings disabled trial is in no way a good idea, it seems to be a band-aid on an open wound. If mods were serious about buckling down and trying to get rid of this bandwagon approach SH is going through they would enact stricter rules.
[QUOTE=Zeke129;48154065]"Why reply" is less about making "THIS!" posts and more about coming into a thread just to complain about the thread.[/QUOTE]
I was referencing from what Dai quoted where someone said about making "this" posts, and he said this is why we have "why reply", besides isn't that shit sniping
[QUOTE=Coolboy;48153254]I am still kinda sceptical if the lack of ratings will truly affect the issues mentioned.[/QUOTE]
Won't know until it's tried. Some things you just gotta roll with. I'm not totally chuffed at ratings being removed either (I think ratings add a fun little twist to posting on Facepunch), but there's no point in me or anybody else raising a big fuss about it until we know whether or not the plan even works, and that's going to take some time to monitor. If, as you suggest, removing ratings does nothing to improve the situation in SH, it isn't difficult to revert the change. If the situation does improve, though, and SH gets a little more civil and on point, then that's preferable to some wee icons in my opinion.
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;48154123]Won't know until it's tried. Some things you just gotta roll with. I'm not totally chuffed at ratings being removed either ([B]I think ratings add a fun little twist to posting on Facepunch[/B]), but there's no point in me or anybody else raising a big fuss about it until we know whether or not the plan even works, and that's going to take some time to monitor. If, as you suggest, removing ratings does nothing to improve the situation in SH, it isn't difficult to revert the change. If the situation does improve, though, and SH gets a little more civil and on point, then that's preferable to some wee icons in my opinion.[/QUOTE]
but tons of other forums have the same ratings with the same icons save for funny :v:
[QUOTE=Zeke129;48154065]"Why reply" is less about making "THIS!" posts and more about coming into a thread just to complain about the thread.[/QUOTE]
"Why Reply?" basically just boils down to making a useless post. Something that contributes almost nothing to the thread. That can mean posting just to complain about a thread, just to say "lol," just to post a picture of a video game that you're somehow vaguely reminded of, and other stuff like that. Basically, "Why Reply?" is our catchall for posts that don't expressly break any of the other written rules, but are still unproductive enough to merit a warning.
[editline]8th July 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=Sand Castle;48154135]but tons of other forums have the same ratings with the same icons save for funny :v:[/QUOTE]
I guess I haven't posted on enough other forums to come across them then. Either way, I think the ratings are a neat lil feature. Of course, if removing them in particular areas of the website improves the experience as a whole, I'm on board with that. Like I said, we just gotta wait and see.
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;48154123]Won't know until it's tried. Some things you just gotta roll with. I'm not totally chuffed at ratings being removed either (I think ratings add a fun little twist to posting on Facepunch), but there's no point in me or anybody else raising a big fuss about it until we know whether or not the plan even works, and that's going to take some time to monitor. If, as you suggest, removing ratings does nothing to improve the situation in SH, it isn't difficult to revert the change. If the situation does improve, though, and SH gets a little more civil and on point, then that's preferable to some wee icons in my opinion.[/QUOTE]
What was/is the situation on SH which needed correcting? I go there every day to read but I didn't realize it was such a problematic forum until, well, you guys removed the ratings.
So far the closest thing to an answer I've seen is Starpluck saying they discourage discussion which hasn't actually been proven. And this is by definition a 'discussion board' as he said but let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Some of the most popular threads involve posting images only so that can't really be used as an argument.
Robotboy making FP browsing experience better, other mods shuffling shit up making FP experience bad. :suicide:
I'm going to chip in my support for ratings in SH. Really don't understand why they've been disabled. What problems did they produce?
To me, they only added to the discussion because it allowed for participation in discussions/debates without actually having to post about it. Pretty much the entire reason I even read SH discussions was to see what sides the majority stood on and to pitch in my own votes. I don't often have much to say that hasn't already been said. Therefore I like to participate by agreeing or disagreeing with the existing posts.
This might seem weird to some of you, but I really won't care about discussions in SH anymore if ratings stay gone. Ratings were the main reason I even read through any threads beyond the OP in there. I found it to be a unique system of discussion that I couldn't get elsewhere, and now it's gone. On top of the other ever-tightening restrictions on SH, I'm finding less and less of a reason to even go there.
[QUOTE=No_Excuses;48154160]What was/is the situation on SH which needed correcting? I go there every day to read but I didn't realize it was such a problematic forum until, well, you guys removed the ratings.
So far the closest thing to an answer I've seen is Starpluck saying they discourage discussion which hasn't actually been proven.[/QUOTE]
What do you want, charts and graphs and published studies? That's exactly what we're testing. Either this will make conversation in SH more civil and on point, thus improving the user experience, or it won't. Can't say for sure until we fuck around with things and see how it goes. That's about the extent of our plan when we try out new forum changes. Fuck around, see if it works. Sometimes science is more art than science, Morty.
How am I supposed to make a controversial fringe post and then rate myself agree to make myself seem less crazy now?
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;48154174]What do you want, charts and graphs and published studies? That's exactly what we're testing. Either this will make conversation in SH more civil and on point, or it won't. Can't say for sure until we fiddle around with things and see how it goes. That's about the extent of our plan when we try out new forum changes. Sometimes science is more art than science, Morty.[/QUOTE]
This is still a non-answer. I browse SH every single day and I don't really see what's not "civil and on-point" about it. The serious topics tend to garner serious discussion and the silly topics tend to garner light-hearted discussion. Honestly these changes you guys keep making just seem to be an attempt to stamp out the latter entirely, which is completely unwarranted in my opinion. SH was never expressly a Super Serious Debate Zone, and I'd really prefer if it wasn't.
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;48154174]What do you want, charts and graphs and published studies? That's exactly what we're testing. Either this will make conversation in SH more civil and on point, thus improving the user experience, or it won't. Can't say for sure until we fuck around with things and see how it goes. That's about the extent of our plan when we try out new forum changes. Fuck around, see if it works. Sometimes science is more art than science, Morty.[/QUOTE]
I think the thing that most people are worried about is that when a change happens, its almost always permanent no matter what the community thinks.
If you're going to change stuff in SH can you expand the ban on posting speedtests to cover posting local temperatures as well ("ha you guys are worried about 40C? Where I live it's 1000C every day") because it's basically the same thing? That's like my top wish for SH
[QUOTE=Sand Castle;48153582][URL="http://www.facepunch.com/threads/1210099?p=37545592#post37545592"]the biggest example of ratings whoring in SH[/URL][/QUOTE]
Oh man I remember this thread.
Damn, 2012? Time sure does fly.
[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;48154214][url]http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1475046&p=48150246&viewfull=1#post48150246[/url]
There's one with in 20 seconds of me finding.[/QUOTE]
Basically the only reason that was posted is because the guy looks like gaben, so... how is that not on-point?
[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;48154214][url]http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1475046&p=48150246&viewfull=1#post48150246[/url]
There's one with in 20 seconds of me finding.[/QUOTE]
How is that not civil, and quite frankly that's probably the entire reason the OP posted it in the first place (I saw the same joke made on Facebook by >Implying Video Games Are Fun before I even saw in in SH).
[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;48154214][url]http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1475046&p=48150246&viewfull=1#post48150246[/url]
There's one with in 20 seconds of me finding.[/QUOTE]
What's not civil and on-point about this? I don't see anything "uncivil" and the guy looks [B]a lot[/B] like Gabe Newell, so obviously people are going to comment about that. There's also plenty of posts in there that aren't about Gabe and plenty of people replying to them, forming discussion.
[QUOTE=EnlightenDead;48154190]I think the thing that most people are worried about is that when a change happens, its almost always permanent no matter what the community thinks.[/QUOTE]
To be fair, that's because mods haven't had a whole lot of say so in these matters until Robot came along. Before him, and after Hezzy, almost all forum changes were made primarily by Garry. We'd have a chance to talk it out, but this is his forum and he can damn well do as he pleases with it. So, if he wanted something a certain way, he'd change it. If it needed tweaking, it might take a while to put it in effect, because he's a busy friggen dude.
But we got Robot now! With him spearheading web development and being super communicative with us, we mods are able to play a much bigger role in helping to shape the forums. It also affords us the freedom to affect changes much more quickly, tweak them reactively, and generally just spitball ideas. We just say, "Hey, Rutabaga, can we try this? Is this possible? What do you think of this?" And he says, "Okay," crashes the forums a few times, deletes literally everything by mistake, breaks some random stuff, and then fixes everything at the last second, and it is done! (I am kidding Rango, you are amazing, gos bless you).
Personally dumb jokes aren't one of the things that bothers me about SH, I'm more bothered by how repetitive a lot of threads are like thread involves guns = another gun control argument, thread about the Queen = another monarchy argument, thread about heatwave = "it's hotter in my country!!" I can often just read the title of a thread and know exactly what the replies are going to be, and I've read it all before several times in other threads
I don't know what the mods could do about that though really
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;48154174]What do you want, charts and graphs and published studies? That's exactly what we're testing. Either this will make conversation in SH more civil and on point, thus improving the user experience, or it won't. Can't say for sure until we fuck around with things and see how it goes. That's about the extent of our plan when we try out new forum changes. Fuck around, see if it works. Sometimes science is more art than science, Morty.[/QUOTE]
Then let's do this right and have a poll in a couple weeks time or however long. Ask the community if their experience has improved, remained the same or gotten worse since the change.
This is all for us, in theory, so let us decide.
[QUOTE=smurfy;48154254]Personally dumb jokes aren't one of the things that bothers me about SH, I'm more bothered by how repetitive a lot of threads are like thread involves guns = another gun control argument, thread about the Queen = another monarchy argument, thread about heatwave = "it's hotter in my country!!" I can often just read the title of a thread and know exactly what the replies are going to be, and I've read it all before several times in other threads
I don't know what the mods could do about that though really[/QUOTE]
That's the nature of having any sort of discussion on those topics though. People are interested in discussing certain topics and they will gravitate towards what is most interesting in a story. It always annoys me when there's a thread about someone being executed, for instance, and as soon as someone comments about the death penalty another person says "let's not turn this into a death penalty thread!" What else is there to post about? "Cool news article. I read it and now I know something I didn't know before reading it. Well article'd, sir." Some people want to avoid hot-button issues like gun control and religion and so on because they don't like arguing (discussing) in general, but what is the point of having a news forum section where you can post comments then?
I've even seen mods say "keep the thread on track, don't discuss X major topic because it always causes arguments" and I'm always confused as to what the purpose of posting at all is at that point.
im assuming that ratings being disabled in SH was sort of to stop rating spam from polarizing comments right out of the gate, immediately making every thread into a debate by boiling all responses down to YES, yes, no and NO, to stop giving a way for shitty silent users to troll/be racists/be weirdos, immediately making people feel like they have to contribute using a defensive tone, etc
i mean in practice SH isn't that far off from mass debate
[QUOTE=No_Excuses;48154274]Then let's do this right and have a poll in a couple weeks time or however long. Ask the community if their experience has improved, remained the same or gotten worse since the change.
This is all for us, in theory, so let us decide.[/QUOTE]
Not really necessary. We'll be able to tell if things are improving or not by the amount of moderator action necessary. We're currently wasting a lot of time dealing with dumb shit as a result of silliness in SH. If the amount of dumb shit we have to deal with decreases, and if the mods who tend to spend a lot of time in SH (me, Starpluck, Dai, Swebo, OvB, SteveUK, etc) notice that threads are generally moving along better, then what point is there to making a big show of polling the public for something we can pretty easily monitor firsthand?
[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;48154252]My bad then. I just don't think it was that funny at all or not on point. I do have to ask though since I'm wrong what is actually not on point?
I really want to know not trying to be a troll or anything.[/QUOTE]
To me that means off-topic or inappropriate discussion. To apply this to your example, talking about Gabe Newell wasn't off-topic since the guy looks uncannily like Gabe Newell. It's also not inappropriate since the news isn't something tragic or controversial; it's just a guy getting arrested for child porn and giving a shitty self-defense statement (while looking incredibly like GabeN).
You don't see inappropriate posts in threads like [URL="http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1474978"]this[/URL], for example. That news is extremely tragic and heart-breaking, and cracking a joke in there would be such a shitty thing to do. It's pretty much all serious comments and discussion.
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;48154289]Not really necessary. We'll be able to tell if things are improving or not by the amount of moderator action necessary. We're currently wasting a lot of time dealing with dumb shit as a result of silliness in SH. If the amount of dumb shit we have to deal with decreases, and if the mods who tend to spend a lot of time in SH (me, Starpluck, Dai, Swebo, OvB, SteveUK, etc) notice that threads are generally moving along better, then what point is there to making a big show of polling the public for something we can pretty easily monitor firsthand?[/QUOTE]
Having to do less moderation doesn't necessarily mean the end user is having a more enjoyable experience. This whole thing too subjective for my tastes. And even if there's no perceivable change in thread quality, people would still want them back. I'm assuming unless the forum takes a complete 180 into the trash starting now, ratings aren't comping back and that makes me frustrated.
[QUOTE=Shugo;48154292]To me that means off-topic or inappropriate discussion. To apply this to your example, talking about Gabe Newell wasn't off-topic since the guy looks uncannily like Gabe Newell. It's also not inappropriate since the news isn't something tragic or controversial; it's just a guy getting arrested for child porn and giving a shitty self-defense statement (while looking incredibly like GabeN).
You don't see inappropriate posts in threads like [URL="http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1474978"]this[/URL], for example. That news is extremely tragic and heart-breaking, and cracking a joke in there would be such a shitty thing to do. It's pretty much all serious comments and discussion.[/QUOTE]
that thread is already on the way to being a debate about the death penalty, i give it 1 more page
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;48154289]Not really necessary. We'll be able to tell if things are improving or not by the amount of moderator action necessary. We're currently wasting a lot of time dealing with dumb shit as a result of silliness in SH. If the amount of dumb shit we have to deal with decreases, and if the mods who tend to spend a lot of time in SH (me, Starpluck, Dai, Swebo, OvB, SteveUK, etc) notice that threads are generally moving along better, then what point is there to making a big show of polling the public for something we can pretty easily monitor firsthand?[/QUOTE]
So if SH participation/posting falls, thus warranting less moderator action just on principle, will this be considered a victory or a failure?
Also, out of genuine curiosity, what kind of "dumb shit" do you guys currently deal with in SH? What have you been banning for lately that you think the removal of ratings will stop?
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