What is the a2k hall of fame all about?

You also disputed the notion that you "led" with this since the beginning of a2k. And that is what I am referring to.

You seem to think it's a requirement to personally direct those comments at me to qualify for having "led" with the "customer is always wrong chip" on your shoulder since the start. But when you show up and put that in your bug reports when nobody has treated you that way I think that qualifies as having led with this chip on your shoulder from the start, even if you didn't go so far as to specifically attribute that quality to me by name (leaving the clear possibility that it was for one of the many other tech support personnel).



As you will Setanta, you aren't wrong.

However you did lead with this chip on your shoulder from the start, and you did claim not to have. But you also claimed not to specifically have attributed this to me more than once and by virtue of getting a secondary statement correct you really must not be wrong about any others either.

I have enjoyed A2K for a long time and have Robert and the folks who help him keeping this thing going, and the other posters here, to thank for that. Not every detail about how A2K works pleases me at every turn, but then I don't have to deal with the chore of making it all fit together, or of pleasing others whose preferences may be different from mine. Changes in the way the site works can feel uncomfortable for a while, but soon enough I get as accustomed to them as I was with the earlier interface. Overall the site has grown in its menu of features without suffering any noticeable (to me) loss of utility. Not bad in my book.

Why look for problems? Why not just enjoy it?

You really are delusional aren't you? How can you pretend that you did not come here and start criticizing me specifically? I am not imagining these things Setanta, you really do say them. Did it escape you that your reply "to what Chai had written" was about me? Did you just forget to make it ambiguous enough to hide behind or something?



You have such a selective memory. Again, it is a good thing that the forum doesn't.

I'll definitely work on this.

No! Please look for problems, you give useful (and polite) bug reports and are a good foil to my own typical use cases. These are rare (I wish Monger were still around, he was amazing about finding them) and I value them a lot.

I want to get back to this because it's on topic and touches on legitimate concerns about recent changes.



That this kind of thing can amplify popularity as a signal (this means a variable, or input on the site that we later use to change the site behavior) but we've gone out of our way to implement it in ways that it doesn't.

It's also important to note that things like popularity are inherent, they are never not going to be there, so it's about a matter of degree, not absolutes. So the way these features are implemented can influence the degree to which something is used a particular way. And we aren't going the opposite direction of cliques and popularity.

I'll just give you three examples, but there are many details that went into constructing this with an emphasis on post filtering, and not popularity.

1) You can't vote for posts on the My Friends page. This is because I know this leads to behavior in which friends just start voting all their friends posts up.

Can they still do so? Sure, and if that becomes more of a problem we'll tweak our algorithms (formulas for how things work) more and will discard more votes (we already discard votes from duplicate accounts etc when we can) but when they have to click through to each post to vote this behavior is much more rare.

2) Following isn't mutual. If you are interested in them you can follow, and there doesn't have to be any "acceptance" of it. This allows for lots of use that is not intimate in nature but based on interest. For example, I follow some people who I don't know from Adam and who don't follow me but they talk about things I like so I follow to find it easily. The one-way following makes it a lot less about personality and more about content when you use it that way.

3) You are limited in how many you can follow. The "My Friends" page isn't very useful if you follow tons of users, after all a filter isn't much of a filter if it isn't... filtering. So right now there is a high limit of something like 1000, that is in place just because of scalability issues (meaning that because of the way this works more than that could make pages load more slowly etc) but this will probably be lowered much more. That we also don't include any friend counts (which we may one day) and all should also make it clear that this doesn't lend itself well to trying to build up your counts like on some other social networks.

Will popularity be a factor in following? Of course, and popularity we will always have with us. I couldn't kill popularity if I tried. So what I need to do is make features that lend themselves more readily to constructive uses of able2know and I think you'll see that the friends feature doesn't impact the site towards popularity much at all. I think it will bring about more activity and that the clique components of it will be very small (e.g. the ones who build up a clique list that they follow will make their My Friends page pretty useless and if all they are doing is displaying avatars on their profile the vanity component is kept very superficial and doesn't really impact the site culture).

well, i've been away a while, and will probably be away a while hence, but i acknowledge & accept my induction, whether by an individual or by an automated mechanism, i know not, and haven't the motivation to read the entire thread to determine. i don't think i wrote run-on-sentences like that previously, but it *has* been a while. anyway, the *induction* happened to almost coincide with my birthday, a happy coincidence one might say. so i'll say aloha & mahalo for now. yw

I'm curious what the benefit might be of me being able to see who others are following.

so you can see who has more friends and feel all torn up about it

I haven't been using the friends/ following feature much yet, but one thing I did do was check Robert's and Thomas' friends pages because they chose some interesting people I hadn't thought of. I didn't DO anything about it, but I can see that as a use.

The main reason I'd want to use friends/ following (I see confusion arising from the different terminology btw) is to catch a post from someone I enjoy reading but who doesn't post often.

Hey ... a yit sighting!

Not sure what it might be for you, I personally use it for member discovery. Like a filtered member list. If you click on the "view all" links above the avatars you'll see buttons to follow/unfollow there and that is the main purpose for it.

So if I know someone else is interested in poker (this is actually a twitter example but it's the same there) I may look at who they follow and find a lot of other interesting folk who talk about poker.

You really like this fallacy of equivocation gig don't you?

I did not say that you were pulling your ole "customer is always wrong" gig in that post. You characterized this as you innocently talking to chai and me taking your criticism personally. You had said, that "RG decided to have another one of his puerile hyssie fits based on an assumption that all criticisms are directed at him personally" and this ignores that you started by specifically criticizing me by name and that no such assumption was necessary.

It's self-serving delusion for you to pretend you didn't come here and start criticizing me. It's delusional for you to pretend that I am imaging that you criticize me when you are not. This is what I am referring to, when I was talking about your chip on the shoulder about "the customer is always wrong" you tried to deflect onto this by saying you'd been talking to chai and I assumed insult where there was none. And when I now point out that you started the conversation with chai by naming me directly in criticism you try to switch back to the talk about the chip on your shoulder. It is to laugh, you think anyone's actually falling for this kind of deflection other than yourself?

I'm not "pee-ing in [my] little lace panties", I'm not even wearing my lace panties today and to be honest this is becoming more amusing now than irritating, you are simply an incorrigible jackass and it's more spectacle now than insult. I'm not going to take it as personally but I'm still going to call a spade a spade. I didn't come here to start insulting and criticizing you, I came here to explain things I was asked to explain. You are just being a jerk as per usual and refusing to accept any responsibility at all for what you say and do.



Perhaps, but that is your quotidian state while on the morrow I will mend.

glad i'm not completely forgotten. i remember there was a quote setanta made about you, which you used in your signature, but i can't remember it anymore--very complimentary if it wasn't sarcastic--or am i confusing you with another? y

Theys commin outta the woodwork...great to see ya yit