The rules are changing, we are going to start showing the assholes the door

@roger,

BTW, I wouldn't recommend using ignore for those spammers. First of all we have significantly stemmed the flood of spam this month and that kind of pages and pages of spam thing isn't happening much anymore (and we'll continue to work on fixing it, it was completely out of control)

Also because there will eventually be a limit to how many you can ignore (mainly a technical issue with performance on the future platform) so you will be wasting your valuable block slots on spammers who aren't gonna be let back in anyway.

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@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

basically all tags other than the topic starter's tags will be discarded

That's a double edged sword - so many content creators are woeful at metadata creation. I've tagged other people's stuff just so I can find it again. For example there are threads with either atheist or atheism tags, that you couldn't list in the same forum until both tags were present. Even plurals cause this issue. You need a good librarian (I don't know any).

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@roger,

ditto that.

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@hingehead,

But the entire information architecture is going to change. This sought to be the big community and those were the forums. In the future there will be individual communities for "music" etc so the topics will be organized without the whim of graffiti taggers and tagging will merely be a secondary taxonomy like keywords that will serve a different purpose than it does now.

Basically tags won't be forums anymore, they'll be more like hashtags on other sites that group content by keyword but that is not the primary way the content is categorized.

As for saving topics for yourself, that is still up in the air but there may remain a save post function, and it may allow for tags (that only work for you).

But don't quote me on this, my vision for the next platform is already ridiculously ambitious and I must focus on the features that absolutely matter first to have any chance of it getting out the door.

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@roger,

Quote:

I've got hundreds of pages of ignores.

That's cool Roger, I wasn't suggesting showing counts of how many you've got on ignore, just counts of how many had you on ignore. Maybe on your user profile page. Even a colour based on your deviation from the mean.

Effectively the thumb up/down counts do the same for threads. You don't see what you've thumbed down but for the rest you get a sort of a rating of 'approval' although participation is blurred into this rating.

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@Robert Gentel,

Cool. Won't hold you to anything, just glad you're thinking about it.

I get a little excited when you say Information Architecture and Taxonomy in the same post.

If you'd thrown an Ontology in there I might have had to excuse myself.

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@hingehead,

Rankings (of any sort) on the user level are tricky, they can cut both ways.

They can be useful because features can be made so that you could, say, just choose not to interact with or to see posters who have a significant history of low quality postings (as determined by the imperfect community, of course).

But the drama that a user-level score would bring would be enormous. I have thought about this issue for over 7 years now and have not yet resolved all the problems there are with it in my head.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

Americans of African descent are notorious for their antisemitism, going so far as to blame the slave trade on Jews.

I just have a (to me) humorous observation to make about this post.

1. Notice the carefully-crafted reference to the black race, which is designed to give an air of the most objective, impartial observation: "Americans of African descent." Who the hell ever says THAT? "Afro-American" would suffice, but that wouldn't sound quite so "intellectual" and "sincere," I suppose. This is a set up for what comes next:

2."are notorious for their anti-Semitism." Every attempt is made to appear "non-racist" so that a racist punch-line can be delivered. Go figure, eh?

From my experience, I would say this type of thing is very common, almost typical, of those who undertake to enforce PC standards.

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@hingehead,

Made me laugh.. (nicely)

On tags, I tagged like a crazed woman thinking I was helping, tagging older threads at the time, late 2008 or early 2009? I wasn't the only one. I lived to regret it not all so long later, as the usual marker words were always first in line, in contrast to any further clue of interesting stuff happening in the thread. This has diminished, and I'm not actually whining, just that I agree with proposed change. I'm guessing the OP can re-energize a thread if new interesting things are talked about, say, in FOOD. That one has luckily moldered away as a constant.

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@layman,

While I do not at all agree with your point (that "Zionist" is a slur on the level of "kike" even though "Zionist" has undergone clear linguistic pejoration) that does seem to be the point you were making and your use of "kike" in that context is not hate speech and is not something we want to become involved in.

Incidentally that kind of high-volume/low-coherence stuff that started the exchange is something we will act on. People are free to post their nutty, incoherent rants but when they flood the forum with ones that nobody in the forum finds any utility in they will be suspended.

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@Robert Gentel,

Maybe I'll do some culling, then. There are a few frequent posters I really don't want to see, and I'd hate to see them start popping up again.

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@hingehead,

hingehead wrote:

Quote:
basically all tags other than the topic starter's tags will be discarded

That's a double edged sword - so many content creators are woeful at metadata creation. I've tagged other people's stuff just so I can find it again.

oh yeah <said in deep deep voice>

I swear some people graffiti tag their own threads or simply don't know what they're about.

EFL threads tagged grammar that are actually vocabulary questions make my head spin.

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@roger,

That is a better usecase for the feature, with spammers you should be able to expect the community managers to fix that for you so they present a less useful case for it.

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@ehBeth,

Yeah, the good news is that right now while tags essentially define what "forums" topics are in and while such bad metadata destroys forum organization the new system will not rely on tags nearly at all for forum organization and their importance to taxonomy is going to be relegated to near hashtag on twitter status.

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@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

While I do not at all agree with your point (that "Zionist" is a slur on the level of "kike" even though "Zionist" has undergone clear linguistic pejoration) that does seem to be the point you were making and your use of "kike" in that context is not hate speech..

OK, Bob, cool.

Quote:

While I do not at all agree with your point (that "Zionist" is a slur on the level of "kike"

You're right, they are certainly not inherently equivalent. But, for some (not all), the two are interchangeable in intent and meaning. Again, for some, they are virtual synonyms. Among that "some" I would include, despite his feigned ignorance and innocence, the poster I was addressing the comments to.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

Do you believe that is really possible? I suppose that's a progressive notion, but my strong impression is that the historical track record for such efforts isn't very good. Human nature is involved here. You can't really have interesting free discussion and control of speech at the same time.

No, George, I don't think it's really possible, in practice. But Robert seems to, and it's his playground, so that's all that matters. He has a vision of a better (maybe just from an economic perspective, I can't say) A2K. Given what he's said, I can't see why he thinks it's necessary to change THIS site. There will be a virtually limitless network of alternative "sites," or "communities" as he calls them, that will be available to those who don't like this site.

So what is the need to change this site? This could be the "unmoderated" site, for those who prefer it that way. For those who WANT moderation, there will be plenty of options.

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@Robert Gentel,

This will be new to me. I don't do FB or twit. Old, y'now, set in my ways.

I look forward to the changes.

Have fun with it.

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Another thing we will be looking at are people who indiscriminately down vote all posts in threads or all posts by certain users.

The new system will discard these votes (and filter new instances of it) but the people doing it now may be suspended as the current system does not have a more elegant way of dealing with this kind of site vandalism.

To be clear, I'm talking about people who are down voting in the dozens of times indiscriminately.

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@Robert Gentel,

That sounds like a winner. Those thumbs are important to some.

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@Robert Gentel,

Thumbing has been totally abused by the clique who dont like it done to them, apparently. Why do some have every single post they make marked down? I suspect some part of the program pre-loads people who dont share the same views of the management.

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The rules are changing, we are going to start showing the assholes the door

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