a2k sucks

@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

maxdancona wrote:
I don't like the idea of the the technology allowing a member or a group of members to control what other people see.

This is not new to technology, if someone doesn't want to talk to you in real life they just don't. They get to walk away and avoid you. You don't get to insist on talking to them anyway. This is a social norm issue and not a technology issue.

Just dont claim that this is an discussion of ideas place after you do that.

Quote:

You don't get to insist on talking to them anyway.

More bullshit from you. I cant make anyone read what I write. That was the point of the ignore, remember, to make avoiding reading what people like me write easier.

You are either lying to us or you are seriously mixed up Robert. Get a grip, you used to be better.

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@Robert Gentel,

I think the better metaphor is when a speaker with unpopular views is prevented from appearing in a public forum by protesters.

The issue is that one person shouldn't be able to prevent me from speaking publicly. Anyone should be able to walk away themselves and not listen to what I have to say, but they shouldn't be able to keep me from speaking to others.

I think that Able2know has great value as a forum where anyone can speak publicly (and of course anyone can choose to listen or to engage or to ignore).

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

You aren't prevented from appearing in a public forum, just in their own conversations within the forum. One person is not preventing you from speaking publicly at all, one person is preventing you from speaking only to them. You can create any conversations of your own that you want, or join anyone else's.

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

You aren't prevented from appearing in a public forum, just in their own conversations within the forum. One person is not preventing you from speaking publicly at all, one person is preventing you from speaking only to them. You can create any conversations of your own that you want, or join anyone else's.

More Bullshit. Speaking "only to them" would be a PM not a thread post.

You are reminding me of Firefly, she who is always sure that she can blow the bullshit past us. Nope. You just look stupid in the attempt.

Come up with a decent argument (using standard definitions for words) or else admit that you are either wrong or lying, that is how this works.

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@Robert Gentel,

Sure.

I am just a consumer of Able2know. I want to give my feedback on the proposed features as a member here. Maybe it will be helpful to you to have this feedback.

The great value that Able2Know gives me, and the reason I am here, is to have interesting discussions with people who have differing points of view. I like to have civil discussions. I like to be able to express my ideas. And I like to have my ideas challenged by people who see things differently.

As a consumer, these are the things that make me happy.

That is why I strongly prefer open threads where no opinion or point of view is excluded. I would like moderation of personal attacks... but nothing else.

I don't mind if there are exclusionary threads as well. I probably won't want to personally participate. But I have no problem if they exist (in addition to open threads) to make all of your consumers happy.

It would be nice if the thread policy, who was excluded, were transparent. If Alice starts a thread that explicitly excludes Bob and Carol, I would like to know that before I choose to join Alice's thread. I might want to start an open thread that would allow Bob and Carol to participate too.

This is just my two cents. Hopefully it is helpful.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

When people ask to delete threads they have started, the answer in the past has been no, others are participating in a discussion. If I participate in your thread and it takes an interesting turn, I might value someone else's opinion, but you could have preemptively banned them. You might not even be around any more and your ban is still in effect. (The original Obama thread is eight years old and still gets posts even though the OP is long gone.) Of course, I could start my own thread and maybe quote twenty or thirty posts that contributed to the conversation, but that is redundant and also splits the debate, watering it down. The current process is great. I don't see the people I don't want to see, but the debate flows around that absence like a river around a rock. If they want to respond to my post, fine, I'll never see it. If others find it valuable, maybe they will respond and show me it was worth my time.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

I am just a consumer of Able2know. I want to give my feedback on the proposed features as a member here. Maybe it will be helpful to you to have this feedback.

It is to some extent, but asking people what they want is much less useful a way to get feedback than merely observing what they do. The feedback in the form of opinions is all over the place and doesn't indicate any clear course of action, and even if it did there's no telling if the consensus opinion is right. The only way to tell is to actually measure it.

That is what will ultimately drive the decisions, objective feedback from aggregate behavior not anecdotes of opinion no matter how strongly held.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

4-5 years ago you claimed that you finally got it, you said that you knew that you suck at being the spokesman for ownership, you said that you would find someone else to do the job. WTF happened? You still suck at this. I am available and I am a hell of a lot better at this that you are, would you like me to take over?

If not at least then get us some coherent arguments.

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@engineer,

I can see the downsides you see there, I just happen to think they are vastly outweighed by the upsides. We'll see.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

I can see the downsides you see there, I just happen to think they are vastly outweighed by the upsides. We'll see.

Upsides yet to be named.

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@Robert Gentel,

Driving decisions on data requires that you decide on goals and metrics to optimize. I am curious about what metrics you will be using, and what the goals will be?

There is a core group that is prominent here now that has a rather narrow set of opinions. You can see that dissenting opinions lead to nasty personal attacks from popular members. This is perhaps your greatest consumer group, and if you the goal is to make them happy, then you will do one thing. Perhaps optimizing the satisfaction of the current user group would be something along the lines of exclusionary threads and gated communities.

If the goal is a healthy diverse community having interesting discussion with differing points of view, it will lead to different metrics and different decisions being made. You might measure, for example, that opinions have gotten narrower, and that moderate Republicans (for example) have largely been driven off.

I am a software engineer, and you won't hear me argue against a data driven process. I do hope that the metrics you choose to use favor respectful discussion and debate were diverse opinions are encouraged.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

I'd probably rely mostly, but not entirely, on standard engagement metrics. As for whether the community favors and whether it's diversity, respectfulness etc that is not something I am going to try to influence at all.

The big point of the change is not the blocking (which is a very trivial part of it all getting all the attention). It is that instead of deciding how the community will be run it will be a platform for any of you to start and run communities how you see fit.

For the most part, we'll make it up to the community managers to define even things like how the interface works within their communities. There will be many different community cultures and users will be able to pick from them.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

The big point of the change is not the blocking (which is a very trivial part of it all getting all the attention). It is that instead of deciding how the community will be run it will be a platform for any of you to start and run communities how you see fit.

I like this idea I think.

Obviously I have no ability or right to influence these decisions, but I am a community member here and I have invested time to try to build what I feel is the kind of community I want to be a part of.

If you are kind enough to give me the tools to build an open community where ideas can be exchanged and debated respectfully from diverse points of view, I will put in the effort to try to make it work. Allowing a setting within a community to take away the ability to block members from threads would be appreciated and would also give you the ability to measure the effect of such a feature.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

Obviously I have no ability or right to influence these decisions, but I am a community member here and I have invested time to try to build what I feel is the kind of community I want to be a part of.

One of the goals of the platform is to do more to hand the keys to the community. Not only will the members be able to make their own communities and run them how they want but there will be a subscription option for users and the revenue will go mostly to the content creators and community managers (with the network getting around 30% to handle the infrastructure).

The whole point of our rewrite is to let the users run their own communities how they want and to own them and profit from them. We want to make an ecosystem for communities so we need to get it right and create an environment where communities thrive. Or we'll fail and have wasted all the time and money trying.

Quote:

Allowing a setting within a community to take away the ability to block threads would be appreciated and would also give you the ability to measure the effect of such a feature.

That's the kind of thing that is going to be up to community managers whenever possible. With blocking I'm on the fence, it's certainly easier to just punt this decision to each community manager to deal with but I'm not sure that the inconsistency in the application of the feature would be a good user experience. Not sure on that and something we'll probably try to experiment with (one of the key challenges is communicating the haphazardness of the application of the feature to users if it ends up on a per-community basis).

1 Reply

I'm reasonably sure I can adapt to whatever comes down. Like they say "You can get used to anything if you do it long enough - even hanging".

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@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

The whole point of our rewrite is to let the users run their own communities how they want and to own them and profit from them. We want to make an ecosystem for communities so we need to get it right and create an environment where communities thrive. Or we'll fail and have wasted all the time and money trying.

More Bullshit. The point is to kill off A2K and do something else instead, with the hope that some of the content providers make the move, "rewrite" does not cover it. If something is called A2K it will be something else entirely different than what is now known as A2K. A little honesty in language from you would be refreshing, you did not used to be this much of a liar.

What remains of this community is now on a death sentence.

It was mostly had a good life.

A2K RIP.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

After the changes to the interface are implemented, you'll still be here crabbing away with your negative whining ...spending hours each day...throwing around your peculiar brand of BS. What a colossal distorted view you have of your own importance and 'truth'.

Why not try some honest introspection and get a hold of yourself. 95% or more of us will adjust to whatever sorts out with the new interface.

A moment ago you were asking Rob for a job running the asylum! Do you ever look back at what you write?

What a POS.

1 Reply

@Ragman,

Quote:

After the changes to the interface are implemented, you'll still be here

Did not sound to me that there will be any here left, that we will have to seek entrance into someones "community" which of course is abuse of language.

Brings up a good point though, Robert and team would not be doing this unless they already had people lined up to run "communities".

Who are they? What is their vision of the rules that will exist in their dictatorships? What are the legal and financial liabilities of signing up to run a dictatorship on the A2K servers?

We certainly have the right to know.

1 Reply

@djjd62,

djjd62 wrote:

and as i mostly only come here to take the piss, will there be urinals?

there are urinals now?!

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

It's going to become more powerful, it will be a "block" feature and will not only ignore the user but prevent them from being able to see and respond to your posts.

I was hoping you'd given up on the hyper ignore function.

Having read through the thread, I see that others have articulated the same concern that I have about it, but here's my take on why it is a bad idea.

Lets say hypothetically I have some bizarre off-the-wall idea that I want to promote. But I know that if I post my off-the-wall views, a particular poster is certain to come along and effectively debunk what I say.

So I put that poster on ignore for awhile and start spouting my bizarre idea. That poster can't see my posts and therefore does not even realize that I am spouting nonsense that should be rebutted. After my thread has passed into history, I take them off ignore and go on as normal.

The end result would be that I posted something objectionable, and then I prevented people from challenging what I posted.

On the plus side, the "voting posts up and down" thing gets abused quite a bit. It might be nice to block the downvote abusers from even being able to find my posts.

A few people mentioned making a2k mobile friendly. I'm not on a mobile device myself, but that's probably critical. A huge portion of internet users only access the internet through mobile devices.

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