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#1 |
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FFR Simfile Author
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I decided that all the ideas I get for improving things - I should start, le gasp, writing them down, so maybe they'll be useful when I find someone to throw them at later. To start, here's one I've been thinking about - how to improve forums. It's a bit rambly:
=== Threads are a poor mechanism for long term information storage. They are useful in a strict present sense, for keeping chronological order, but one who comes to the thread late must digest the entirety of the thread for any useful tidbits in it. The first post can be used to aggregate information, but only if it is possible to edit it. For threads of the variety 'everyone post a contribution', it would be useful to have posts ranked by their usefulness by the community and to be able to look at them from most to least useful. It would also be useful for posts to be taggable and searchable, and then again ordered by rank when searched. This all needs to be done by the community, so there need to be prominent, impelling upvote/downvote/whatever buttons tied to each post, and some kind of mental reward or long term statistic to encourage one to make these ratings (e.g. newgrounds has an XP system, the more you vote the stronger it gets) Instead of going to the base page, or in fact to any particular page, a newcomer should go to a page that starts with the OP then lists posts from most to least rated, possibly also including a mix of recently upvoted posts, the most recent posts and so on. Not sure how to show this consisely, but the point is that, upon coming to a thread for the first time, I should quickly be able to see what contributions the community thinks are the best. I should also be able to see what posts are popular since I last came to the thread. Looking at posts in chronological order is only useful once one wishes to see the context around a legendary post, or if one has the time to consume every post. This way, knowledge and epicness alike will be preserved and seen over and over again, not buried under page #somenumberthatnooneknows. In a similar vein, threads shown under a board should be a mix of new and highly rated. Threads should display tags commonly used on the thread itself/for posts inside it, and tags that are common to many other posts/threads should be highlighted in some way, so I can delve into them for further information on that subject. ===coffee break=== A wiki has a pretty good model - it has a page where all the useful information is aggregated, links can be used for branching out, references can be provided, and it has a talk page to retain chronological ordering of what people are discussing, for those who need to keep up with it. However, for someone consuming a wiki, it is difficult to come back and quickly find what's been updated - looking at the history or at whole pages and figuring out what's changed is difficult, even though there's a 'most recent changes' option on every good wiki. Edits can be made to have an explanation or target a specific area, but it is not mandatory and might be too general. What is needed is a hybrid - to be able to identify new, newish and aging content via a system that tags and itemizes the sections of a wiki page, or even on the paragraph/sentence level, and allows one to quickly see the relevant parts of all recent changes, or look at a page and have sections highlighted by their age. Another thing - youtube comments. Youtube reserves only two slots at the top for the highest upvoted comments, and otherwise are displayed from most recent to least recent. Only the most dedicated comment surfers will be able to find deeply buried comments and alter their upvotedness. To be honest, youtube comments almost always are banal, of the 'quotes a line from the video' or 'all the downvoters are doodyheads' or 'THIS IS THE BEST' variety - which we already have the like and dislike buttons for. Thus, the first change should be to replace upvote and downvote with something like 'interesting/enlightening/useful' vs 'banal/boring/trivial', only succintly worded, so the impetus is to upvote comments that bring something new to the table. Once this is in, you want a mechanism rather than 'most recent' to show comments by. Youtube comments rarely change over time like this, and are only chronologically relevant when in a reply chain - and in any case, seeing the most recent reply of a quote chain only is not helpful. Because the value of a comment is determined by the crowd, the crowd needs access to comments to judge their ratings in addition to comments deemed good - there should be an element of randomization to what it shown, with a bayesian, 'benefit of the doubt' system that shows new and promising new comments with as much strength as highly rated ones until they go many views without alteration or get downvoted, and their perceived value slowly drops until they're as unlikely as other, stale comments. It should also take more than one or two downvotes or a bunch of ignoring views to make a comment lose its momentum - bayesian, again.
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Patashu makes Chiptunes in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu/8bit-progressive-metal-fading-world http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/Mechadragon/smallpackbanner.png Best non-AAAs: ERx8 v2 (14-1-0-4), Hajnal (3-0-0-0), RunnyMorning (8-0-0-4), Xeno-Flow (1-0-0-3), Blue Rose (35-2-0-20), Ketsarku (14-0-0-0), Silence (1-0-0-0), Lolo (14-1-0-1) http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee301/xiaoven/solorulzsig.png |
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#2 |
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sunshine and rainbows
Join Date: Feb 2006
Age: 38
Posts: 1,987
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I'm so glad threads aren't rated on popularity, because the rest of the information we're given and know is based on popularity. I feel like it would just create more homogeneity, which I feel like I can, to some extent, get away from on the internet. I suppose just knowing which posts are popular wouldn't hurt too much, except by giving a chance for the snowballing effects of popularity to happen. If I didn't have to see the most popular ones first I could get behind it.
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#3 |
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FFR Simfile Author
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Like I explained for youtube comments, you'd want best-plus-randomization: usually the highest ranked ones, but on occasion one that shows promise from its upvoted frequency, and on occasion one with even less of a rank, so that posts that don't fit into the top X still have a chance of being recognized.
It would need to be an optional thing, of course, since the chronological view is useful sometimes.
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Patashu makes Chiptunes in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu/8bit-progressive-metal-fading-world http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/Mechadragon/smallpackbanner.png Best non-AAAs: ERx8 v2 (14-1-0-4), Hajnal (3-0-0-0), RunnyMorning (8-0-0-4), Xeno-Flow (1-0-0-3), Blue Rose (35-2-0-20), Ketsarku (14-0-0-0), Silence (1-0-0-0), Lolo (14-1-0-1) http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee301/xiaoven/solorulzsig.png |
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