Rethinking community discussion forums
This is a shitty way to build any form of discussion system where you want new ideas and real discussion rather than just a bunch of people everyone likes saying things everyone likes. People who say things others do not like, even if they say it in a really nice way, will get pushed down due to the pushback from the community, and their content will never be seen, they will get less rep as a result, and will be pushed out. Meanwhile, if the community agrees with something, the idea goes up, and the person with correct opinions is the only one getting a place to speak. This assumes ideas are contended, or debated, rather than disliked entirely by the community. Ideas can be incredibly unpopular, and incredibly hated at first introduction, then grow on people over time. This system prevents that from happening. The idea of a community where your ability to speak depends on how much people like you sounds much the same. Except they won't, because all the posts everyone is able to see will be from those with reputation, and those people will gain reputation at ever faster rates, pushing out everyone lower than them. Even an exponential model isn't going to fix something like this, because no sane amount of exponential increase will turn 1 or 2 votes a post into a user who can compete with 100 or 200 votes a post. Yes, because we should punish the active and dedicated users. Consider a person who is really passionate about a subject, and posts about it frequently. If you arrive several hours late, everyone has already seen the post, and there is nobody else left to comment in the first place, even if you put new comments as a higher weight, it isn't going to well promote new content. Reddit has subreddits, CSS, automoderator. What exactly does this mean? Again, reddit has an ad system that does exactly this. Also having site-control of the content in a site designed to act as reddit is not a good idea. Good luck funding your site. Big words. Now lets see you actually find a decent, fair system to make this work. Great features there.With social media, getting accurate information out of user-submitted content is always hard. But there are steps that could be taken to alleviate this problem. Through the use of sophisticated reputation systems, where user reputation forms the bedrock for deciding which content should be displayed on the front page, we can ensure that high quality content is displayed most prominently.
But posts that have a large number of both upvotes and downvotes will be promoted just as heavily as posts that are universally liked.
But the idea of a community where everyone only agrees with one another, and dissenting voices are promptly silenced
Instead, all new subscribers start off with the same baseline reputation, which gives them little influence over what happens in the community. Over time, as they post content that the regulars like, they build up their reputation
At Caucus, we want to give the quiet ones a fair voice too. Hence why we take into account the number of times someone has voted, or posted content.
if you arrive several hours late to a discussion, your comment has very little chance to make it to the top.
Themed communities
Promote/Sponsor features
No ads. No corporate sponsorships
Organically determined community leaders
And many many more
Ultimately, I think a system like youtube is the best revenue model. Separate the ad and the normal content, and make it so that the ads benefit the users as well as the producers. Producers get ad money, youtube gets ad money, and consumers get good content. Users know their time watching ads goes to create what they love, and will enjoy and often disable adblock or chose to click ads to help the creators as well. Ads will appreciate this fact, and will be willing to use a system because their content becomes inherently, or more, positive in the long run, making a better impression. Secondly, if you have a strong ecosystem, you can use ads to allow users to promote communities, or other systems, assuming it isn't their own. Imagine you could pay to promote a favorite subreddit, or pay to promote some comment, like with reddit gold, but intentionally in a way that moves comments into their own, special, well-seen group. Abuse of that system would need heavy monitoring, but it would be a good way to get a lot of money. The modern trend, with kickstarter and other systems, seems to be leaning towards the trend of user-funded, and user-profits. Hell, you might even say that websites are going to start becoming F2P.
Hey Bio. Your post seems entirely geared towards nitpicking, as opposed to having a honest and fair discussion. But I'll post a detailed response in the hope that I'm wrong :) Regarding circlejerking: Any popular discussion forum has way more content getting posted, than they have space available at the top/front. So any discussion forum needs some way of ranking all these different posts. There are generally 3 ways that discussion forums organize content: 1) Latest post/comment is at the top 2) Moderator curated content 3) People voting for the content they like There's nothing specifically wrong with 1, but it leads to a high volume of low quality, flame-bait posts. Anyone can post something idiotic (eg, dick pics), and they will get put right at the top, just because it's new. Anyone can do this over and over again, and hog the top spots, simply because of how active they are. High quality posts on the other hand, can also drop out of the top very quickly, unless people post repeatedly just to say they agree with it. If you like this kind of high-noise environment, that's great, there's plenty of other sites out there for you. 2 is a great option as well, but I would counter that if you like this option, you would be better served reading newspapers and magazines. After all, that's exactly what they are: content sourced from many different sources, and curated by editors. I read magazines everyday, but when I go to a discussion forum, I prefer one where power isn't centralized in the hands of a few moderators. Which brings us to 3. Any system based around user voting is going to suppress, to some extent, unpopular content, hence why your criticism is unfair when targeted towards a single site like Caucus. Reddit in particular, is especially guilty of this, because of their extremely primitive scoring algorithm where any post with equal numbers of upvotes and downvotes will never be ranked highly. On Caucus, we have a scoring algorithm that allows controversial posts (large number of both upvotes and downvotes) to be scored just as highly as posts that are universally popular. We do filter out posts that have large numbers of downvotes and no upvotes, but this is going to be true for any system that utilizes user voting. It's true that because of the culture/history of some communities, the majority of power could end up in the hands of people whom you dislike, or don't want to be around. For example, if you're a Men's Rights Activist, this is exactly how you would feel in a Feminism-themed community. There is a simple solution for this problem: Leave the community and find one that better matches what you're looking for. On a fundamental level, each community will have its own character, personality, culture, and rightfully so. These characteristics will make it a great home for some people, but not for everyone. Trying to force a community to be everything to everyone will simply lead to a worse outcome for everyone. > If you arrive several hours late, everyone has already seen the post, and there is nobody else left to comment in the first place, even if you put new comments as a higher weight, it isn't going to well promote new content. Posts often have a long tail of viewership. A large burst of people see it in the first few hours, but a large number of people will continue to view it over the next 1-2 days as well. For highly popular post, this tail can extend all the way to multiple weeks. Hence why it's valuable to rank quality comments highly, even if they were only posted a few hours "late." > Themed communities On sites like Reddit, there can only ever be one /r/politics, /r/news or /r/bitcoin community. Which means that everyone interested into those topics get shoehorned into a single community, even if the community and/or its leadership is toxic. This has been a huge problem for /r/bitcoin in particular. Caucus allows multiple communities to form under the umbrella of any theme. This prevents any one community from becoming the de-facto "standard" for that topic. If one /bitcoin community becomes toxic or unappealing, people can thus easily migrate to a different one. > Promote/Sponsor features Users can promote/sponsor content posted by other users. When doing so, the OP gets a tip for their efforts, and the post gets a score boost as well. > No ads. No corporate sponsorships Running a site like Caucus is dirt cheap. I'm also confident that if we build something that people enjoy and benefit from, we'll find adequate ways to make money and keep the site going. If you want to have an open and fair discussion, I'd be happy to talk further. If your goal is simply to nitpick and insult, well, have fun with that :)
You are assuming that users are just seeing a large stream of content that has no real complexity or nuance to it, like a newspaper or a book. Instead, this is the internet, and ordering a set of posts is not all you can do in order to curate content. We can agree that moderator or time based display of content is bad, and that a single-stream page of user content that everyone votes for will result in the suppression of unpopular content. However, remember that you aren't just suppressing unpopular content, you are suppressing unpopular people. While this may lead to more unpopular content being posted, it will encourage a much stronger hive-mind, as everyone posting to a site will see that saying things the majority do not like lead to them being weaker. Exactly my problem with this system. Communities should be based around topics, around discussion of topics, not based on the opinions and demands of the users who frequent that community, at least in the case of topics like "feminism" and "mens rights' where a healthy debate and moderating factor of having those who disagree with you goes a long way towards making a healthy society. This tend towards isolation of opinions is what I feel makes our modern society so extreme in it's values, what makes us hate one another. We just don't understand, we can't comprehend, why people would hold values that disagree with us. For example, I have been banned from many subreddits in the past, often for saying things they disagree with. However, I always make new accounts and continue to post, at least until I can get consistently upvoted in that sub. What's that do, why would I do it? Because it shows me how to say or think how the community does, and encourages myself to learn. The majority aren't willing to do that, though, and require real debate and the response of people who hate the things they are posting in order to get this effect. Systems that encourage isolation are not positive systems. Ultimately, a system should: Encourage the seeing of opposing views. Encourage the formation of cultures and strong senses of community. Encourage people to have a good time seeing posts, and to generally enjoy their discussions and interactions. These three things can be accomplished, but it requires a very nuanced, very intelligent system that is far more than a simple sorting algorithm. We need big-brother neural-networks. More on that later. Is it valuable? I'm sure it may end up beneficial in the long run, but at the end of the day you are still promoting comments based on the time they were posted rather than based on their quality, and you are doing this for the benefit of a minority of users who are viewing the post in this "tail". It's just not a severe enough issue with threads to be noteworthy. That's the point of why reddit pushes threads down so aggressively as well, you have the time-stabilizing system of comments in threads, and the time-destabilizing system of threads themselves. The two complement each other. I'd personally call this clustered or grouped communities. Themed makes it sound like CSS editing. Also, how do you go about which community to show people when they first open up the bitcoin sub? Pick the most popular? Treat bitcoin like a "frontpage of all the /r/bitcoins"? Not when it gets popular, and assuming "we can make money down the line" is not an appropriate fiscal decision. It's later. Here's an example of how I think a system would manage to promote a few different things: I understand it is a pretty complex thing, and likely very hard to implement, and would take a lot of good design to make intuitive to a new user, although that's the purpose of having three levels of interaction, each one gets more complex, and users are slowly encouraged to participate in the lower levels as they become familiar with the site. I agree with the idea of "collections" of communities, and I think these "collections" should go one step further, not binding similar communities that disagree on something like "toxicity", but instead should be used to bind opposing communities in a way they that they cannot escape one another. Consider the system of three levels. The "frontpage" which contains the most popular of all the content, showed to all random visitors to the site. The "collections" which bind topics like "gender" or "science" together into one system. Both of these are directly controlled and moderated by the site owners, and there would be a manageable, recognizable number of them, like the defaults on reddit. Then there are "communities" where there are moderators, well systematized ways to control content, and so on. The frontpage is made of collections, and the collections are made of communities. Users may create a community by binding it to at least one collection, at which it must be approved by the admins for being relevant for the collection or will be reassigned by the admins. Users can post and act on three levels: on the frontpage, on the community, and on the collection. Votes in a high level effect only that level, and those above it, so a large number of users can vote on a post from a community, and that community will not be effected, never seeing or being effected by the votes. Posts are only effected by votes on the layer they are posted in, and any other votes from other places end up not counting against the user. That way you can have three layers of interaction. The average-hoarde that holds a lot of power, but cannot reach into the lower levels, or is prevented from. The interested-users who interact on the stream level, and the real dedicated users that post to a community. To join a community would need some form of gate, a cost in votes, or something else, and it should be relatively easy for the community to rapidly kick out users, meaning you should be careful about the communities you decide to join. Users then have their own front-page, which consists of the things they can subscribe to. Here, the levels disappear, and the streams and communities are treated the same. Posts the user sees from a collection on this front page are voted on as if the user was voting in the collection, but if they are part of the community that made the post, their posts default to the community. In this way, posts and activity default to an action on the lowest possible level. This takes a lot of data. Each post has to know where it came from, keep track of if a comment/vote on it came from a community, stream, or the frontpage. Votes, when made, have to decide if they are going to apply to the user or not. However, this allows an interconnected, but separated, system that allows people to vote, comment, and so on, without drowining out or destroying communities with separate or different ideas. It creates a situation where you cannot avoid creating an isolated chamber in which you are safe from being seen or commented on by others. Users do not get notified of comments on their post in a higher level, but should be able to easily access their posts from that higher level in order to see the common reaction. Users on a higher level, or users not part of the community, will rarely be notified that there is a lower level, and the higher level posts will never be directly linked to the lower level ones. The rankings inside of the collections and frontpage will depend on an "average" of the votes in the community, and in the collection itself. The frontpage will be an average of that average, and votes from the frontpage. This gives a community disportionate power to move posts upwards, stopping the "hive mind" of the larger, more powerfully voting, collections from ever being able to truly control their own content.There are generally 3 ways that discussion forums organize content:
Any system based around user voting is going to suppress, to some extent, unpopular content
There is a simple solution for this problem: Leave the community and find one that better matches what you're looking for.
Trying to force a community to be everything to everyone will simply lead to a worse outcome for everyone.
Hence why it's valuable to rank quality comments highly, even if they were only posted a few hours "late."
Caucus allows multiple communities to form under the umbrella of any theme. ... If one /bitcoin community becomes toxic or unappealing, people can thus easily migrate to a different one.
Running a site like Caucus is dirt cheap.
Encourage the seeing of opposing views.
Encourage the formation of cultures and strong senses of community.
Encourage people to have a good time seeing posts, and to generally enjoy their discussions and interactions.