I've seen a few posts from more experienced members either using or suggesting the use of the "ignore" button. At first, this struck me as unnecessary, but as I've been finding my feet and exploring the forum more, I'm starting to see their point.
There are so many redundant posts needlessly repeating the same information and/or posts where the poster hasn't just failed to read the whole thread before posting but has clearly failed to read even the initial post. To be clear, I'm not referring to redundant topics, which bug me far less, because an old topic covered again by a new user still provides an opportunity for fresh insight. I'm more referring to the situation where 30 users all produce similar low-value "answers" in a given topic.
I'm not sure why there are so many posts like this, but my best guess is that it's users either trying to rank up quickly or trying to fulfill their signature campaign commitments. I've got some empathy for both kinds of user but this type of activity is really lowering the signal to noise ratio and getting in the way of meaningful discussion.
Although I'm very tempted to start, I'm still reluctant to ignore users because it feels "permanent" and I don't want to miss out on their contributions if they decide to change their posting habits. I'm aware that I could remove them from my ignore list in the future, but I also know that I'm unlikely to periodically re-evaluate them and so will probably just leave them there indefinitely.
So, what I would really like is if next to "ignore" there was a less drastic option that only added them to my ignore list temporarily (say for 10 days), something like this:
That way, I can "hush" with reckless abandon and still be assured that nobody will fall off my radar forever.
If users started to regularly "hush" each other for low-quality posts then a useful per-user statistic "H" might be the following:
H = (T / P) ** (1 - S)
Where:
T = The number of times this user was hushed in the previous activity window.
P = The number of times this user could potentially have been hushed in the previous activity window.
S = A severity/harshness control between 0 and 1.
I imagine that if this "hush factor" were shared with campaign managers (no point in paying for posts that aren't being seen) so that they could adjust their payments by it (i.e. scaling the payout by 1 - H), that would make a compelling disincentive for bad posting behavior.
Setting "S" to 0.5 would be a good starting point, but someone (presumably @theymos) would have to carefully fine-tune it to decide how punitive this countermeasure should be.
There are so many redundant posts needlessly repeating the same information and/or posts where the poster hasn't just failed to read the whole thread before posting but has clearly failed to read even the initial post. To be clear, I'm not referring to redundant topics, which bug me far less, because an old topic covered again by a new user still provides an opportunity for fresh insight. I'm more referring to the situation where 30 users all produce similar low-value "answers" in a given topic.
I'm not sure why there are so many posts like this, but my best guess is that it's users either trying to rank up quickly or trying to fulfill their signature campaign commitments. I've got some empathy for both kinds of user but this type of activity is really lowering the signal to noise ratio and getting in the way of meaningful discussion.
Although I'm very tempted to start, I'm still reluctant to ignore users because it feels "permanent" and I don't want to miss out on their contributions if they decide to change their posting habits. I'm aware that I could remove them from my ignore list in the future, but I also know that I'm unlikely to periodically re-evaluate them and so will probably just leave them there indefinitely.
So, what I would really like is if next to "ignore" there was a less drastic option that only added them to my ignore list temporarily (say for 10 days), something like this:
That way, I can "hush" with reckless abandon and still be assured that nobody will fall off my radar forever.
If users started to regularly "hush" each other for low-quality posts then a useful per-user statistic "H" might be the following:
H = (T / P) ** (1 - S)
Where:
T = The number of times this user was hushed in the previous activity window.
P = The number of times this user could potentially have been hushed in the previous activity window.
S = A severity/harshness control between 0 and 1.
I imagine that if this "hush factor" were shared with campaign managers (no point in paying for posts that aren't being seen) so that they could adjust their payments by it (i.e. scaling the payout by 1 - H), that would make a compelling disincentive for bad posting behavior.
Setting "S" to 0.5 would be a good starting point, but someone (presumably @theymos) would have to carefully fine-tune it to decide how punitive this countermeasure should be.