Thumbing up and down: Abuse already?

Nothing. But when you forget that you voted and how you voted, it will remind you that and how you did.

click someone's upturned thumb for green (approve) and downturned thumb for red (disapprove)

What if I click on somebody's downturned thumb 5,000 times? Will they get red-balled?

Nah, you've only got one vote...

nimh -- exactly.

Voting down a topic collapses it out of your sight and whether that's due to some personal reason or not, does it really matter? Once thresholding is improved, you'll be able to set it so that if you want to see everything voted down, hey, go for it. Or you could simply sort by most responses or whatever.

To subscribe to a topic, foxfyre, all you really need to do is tag it. Then go to your profile and click on "My tags". Tags are currently public; I imagine there will be some privacy options in the future.

As for a sanitized A2K, that could happen for an individual if a person voted down every single thing they found squishy. However, fortunately, there's far more than one person on this site. There are thousands, and there will be more. Even when you get into hardcore active daily posters the number is still in the hundreds so one offended person is not going to bury things for all.

One thing to keep in mind is that as more and more tagging and voting occurs, it will begin to shuffle things the way it is supposed to. A few hundred votes and tags are going to loom large for all. Several thousand will assure that one prude or one crank or one ultra-tolerant person will not be able to impose his or her will on the rest of the site. No one will be able to do that without a lot of help.

The reality is, what is felt to be abuse -- including voting up or down political and other preferences -- is really not abuse since it gives users a chance to personalize the A2K experience the way they want it, and there are a myriad of ways (subscribing, different sorts, ones own tagging and voting, setting a higher tolerance threshold, etc.) to counteract that.

Personally, I've voted down a boatload of my own topics as they're grossly out of date and I'd rather see my more current stuff. But if others disagree, they're more than free to do so. Or if they all vote me down, hey, whatever. They have their own reasons and those are their reasons, even if the reason is that they don't like what I have to say. Perhaps that means I need to improve my writing or find more interesting topics. {shrug} Or maybe the people who would love, love, love to read me haven't arrived on the site yet.

Lots of ways to use the system, few ways to abuse it.

The absolute polar opposite of Marine Corps training. That's the spoilt brat syndrome in the play pen. Total absence of discipline. Narcissism in running shoes. A sell out.

They personalised the Georgian experience the way they wanted it and now you're on a who blinks first competition.

Could we have a readily accessible list of those who succeed in personalizing A2K the way they want it and then we can avoid them.

Somebody earlier likened it to a newspaper but that principle has the paper being revised to the readers taste. Everybody's home team wins every week and is top of the table with a record number of points or goals for and no goals or points against.

Everybody reading their own newspaper. It's alienating.

No sooner does the individual count more than the group than chaos starts to get a hold.

relevant info:

Answer me this jespah if you will.

Does it mean that all those anti-IDers on wande's ID thread who I have defeated in argument will no longer have to know they have been defeated and can proceed on their merry way as if they have no opposition?

Won't it go to their heads?

How will they ever evolve. Evolution is based on conditions as they are and not on how each individual would like them to be.

He's pulling your leg. And this is an example of where I think voting the trolling down is more useful than letting him get what he wants: sidetracking the conversation while he plays with people by acting confused and making them explain it over and over.

Hey Jes, thanks for the shout-out and for confirming my impressions. Sounds all great to me.

One question left though:


I still dont quite get how this works. Like, can you browse tags and "my tags" separately?

I thought that they both yielded the same effect. That whether you click "able2know" or "germany" or whatever in the "topic tags" or "popular tags" or some such field, or in "my tags", the result is the same: you get a list of all the threads that were tagged with that word - by anyone! Which makes tagging a thread with "subscribed" useless once many people start doing it.

Is there a way to see only the threads you yourself tagged with a certain tag?

My feelings on the voting systems, exactly.

That's very useful, so I revise my earlier comment. Plus more descriptive information helps to better characterize the topic, which is good all around. Dunno if personal tags versus public tags are going to be separated out but I think they may already be (go to my profile, then click on tags on the left side). I believe that's everything I've tagged but that includes my topics which were all automatically tagged with the name of the old forum in the changeover. So I'm probably not a great example for that. Maybe try someone with fewer topics than me, such as Thomas.

So?

A2K has always been an individual user experience; the new software just gives programmatic ways of doing that. Truth is, people either read or didn't read, opened or didn't open, liked or didn't like, stuff all the time. This has not changed.

Discipline? Anybody honestly think that a site with as many fart threads as this one has is that concerned with individual discipline?

Convincing people? They will be convinced or not, or read or not, like they always have. And that matters how or why? I'm sure people skim my posts all the time if they read them at all. If that was tied up tightly with my ego I'd have an awfully unhealthy view of myself.

Presumably everyone here is perfectly capable of making their own decisions about what they want to spend their time on. I'm not here to impose my will on people and dictate to them how they are to spend their time. And the way the site has changed assures that no one else can do that, either. And that's a good thing, don't you agree?

If that is true, and that you can't understand that thumbs are grey when you don't vote and red or green when you do after multiple explanations then it's still useless clutter for a far less flattering reason than being a troll.

But I don't for a minute believe that.

OK, I tried it with my own... I went to my profile and clicked "My Tags".

The main part of the page, if you do that, lists all the threads I've ever tagged (with anything). So in response to Foxfyre's question, that could be a useful alternative to tagging things "subscribed". Like, if you only tag threads (with whatever tags are relevant to the subject) that you personally want to keep following, then you dont need something like "subscribed", you just go to your profile and click "My tags".

Of course, if you do tag threads that you come along, just to help them be found more easily, even if you yourself are not interested in following them on a regular basis, then this listing doesnt help with Foxfyre's dilemma.

OK, now to my question: on the left side, this page has a box saying "My Tags", and there are the tags that I've used most. Like elections, Europe, funny, music. And if I click on any of them, I get an overview of only the threads that I myself have tagged as such.* Yay!

*Or, if the tag is the name of one of the old forums, like "politics", threads that I started in that forum.

But. That doesn't work with the "my tags" box everywhere. For example, if you go to any thread, on the left you'll have a box called "Topic tags" and one called "My tags". Here, the distinction doesn't work. Whether you click a tag in one box or the other, in both cases you get a listing of any thread tagged with that tag by anyone. (Maybe just a bug?)

Yeah, the tag cloud on your my tags page does that. It needs tweaking and changing (all tag navigation needs a lot of work) but it can do that.

But that still doesn't mean using a "subscribed" tag is helpful because it's still a public tag, and you are essentially telling other users that this is a great topic about "subscribed" as opposed to, say, "new york apartments" and because anything you tag the topic will allow you to follow (or "subscribe") to it.

Of course, some may decide they tag almost everything they see, and use a special tag for what they actually like (instead of only tagging the topics they like) and I can see why that will be personally useful but the overall utility depends on people using more relevant keywords for the topic.

Craven-

I came on A2K in the first place to be Abled to Know some things. And I have been. My procedure for being Abled to Know a bit about those things may not be understood but it is I think effective. I have chosen all my reading in the last 3 years in relation to your brainchild.

So I owe you a large debt of gratitude.

It saddens me that you, of all people, should call me a troll.

I feel like I have visited America. My interest in the US started when I was in short pants with the Reader's Digest and the Movies and has never waned. But that was a presentation. A2K was pretty down home.

Craven-

In the Wiki definition of "troll" the word "disruptive" is used.

But isn't disruptive the essence of democracy? It is not a subjective word in free countries. Where would we be with no disruptiveness.

Not that I think I am disruptive.

And this thread is about thumbs and I've stuck to thumbs. (apart from this).