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elementswrath
Finger' trippin good



Registered: 08/04/09
Posts: 5,276
Loc: suiciety
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lately i have been realizing, opting out is a free ticket to shame.
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deCypher



Registered: 02/10/08
Posts: 56,232
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It toadily is.
-------------------- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
 
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vinsue
Grand Old Fart



Registered: 02/17/04
Posts: 17,953
Loc: The Garden State(NJ)
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Quote:
elementswrath said: lately i have been realizing, opting out is a free ticket to shame.
Thats a nice collection of Zeros ya got there. A couple of classics from a couple of asslicks. I got like 30 Zeros I think, but no wonderful pics like you do . . .
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"All mushrooms are edible; but some only once." Croatian proverb. BTW ... Have You Rated Ythans Mom Yet ?? ... ... HERE'S HOW ... (be nice) . ...
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elementswrath
Finger' trippin good



Registered: 08/04/09
Posts: 5,276
Loc: suiciety
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Re: Ythan [Re: vinsue]
#12369725 - 04/10/10 09:28 PM (13 years, 10 months ago) |
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thank you, it's my new obsession.
a wise man once said "if your getting zeros, yer doin something right".
or something like that.
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idiotek


Registered: 02/06/04
Posts: 40,728
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Vinsue's giving of 5-shroom ratings to newbs and strangers is just as far off base from the apparently intended sincerity of general ratings as the "nom nom nom" campaign by sucklesworth.
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Doc_T
Random Dude




Registered: 03/06/09
Posts: 42,395
Loc: Colorado
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Quote:
1d10t3k said: Vinsue's giving of 5-shroom ratings to newbs and strangers is just as far off base from the apparently intended sincerity of general ratings as the "nom nom nom" campaign by sucklesworth. 
Yes/no- a random 5 makes the assumption that a new member is valuable. It's more polite than assuming the opposite.
-------------------- You make it all possible. Doesn't it feel good?
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idiotek


Registered: 02/06/04
Posts: 40,728
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Re: Ythan [Re: Doc_T] 6
#12371562 - 04/11/10 06:29 AM (13 years, 10 months ago) |
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A random 5 implies nothing about a new member. The content of their posts, however, says a lot. Giving out gratuitous 5 ratings in hopes for reciprocated good ratings nullifies the concept of "accurate" ratings as much as ratings rapings.
I'm wasting my time even trying to discuss this. This whole ordeal is another huge overreaction to some butthurt people who take their online shroom ratings far too seriously. If you want them to be accurate in any way, you can't just enforce rules against shallow 0 ratings and not do the same toward 5 ratings as well. An adult, drug-themed website censoring impoliteness/negativity is fucking laughable. Enforcing the already established rules was working just fine in the forums, it's the crybabies who can't handle bad ratings that stir up this shit and bring it on themselves. Watering down the ratings system so that everyone can have good ratings makes them even more pointless than before.
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Doc_T
Random Dude




Registered: 03/06/09
Posts: 42,395
Loc: Colorado
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Agree w/ that last part.
-------------------- You make it all possible. Doesn't it feel good?
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Ythan
ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ


Registered: 08/08/97
Posts: 18,803
Loc: NY/MA/VT Borderlands
Last seen: 1 hour, 43 minutes
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Re: Ythan [Re: Ythan] 11
#12372041 - 04/11/10 10:45 AM (13 years, 10 months ago) |
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I really don't want to get sucked back into this, but this thread just won't die, so I wanted to make one more response and attempt to clear up any misconceptions or concerns about the direction of the site or the motivation of the admins. I can really only speak for myself, so if you want more detailed information about the position of any other admin on a particular issue you'll have to ask him directly. But this thread was addressed to me so I'll give the best answer I can.
Because I started this site and have done a lot to shape it over the years, I feel a sense of responsibility for the course it's on. I spend a lot of time thinking about nuanced and trivial shit, because it's important to me, and so you guys don't have to.
While the site itself is bigger and more vibrant than ever, I am concerned that in some ways it may be degenerating, or perhaps more accurately, failing to scale and evolve with the character and diversity of the internet. There is a general and pervasive sense of arrogance and hostility which is taking hold, from rude treatment of new users, to rating rapes at the slightest provocation, to threads being derailed by flaming. Some people say it's inevitable with our increasing size or demographics, and that may be true as things currently stand, but I'm trying to face the issue instead of just allowing it to occur through inaction.
I understand that free speech is very important to a lot of our members. Both for ideological reasons, and because people appreciate not being babied. I am on the same side with you guys here and I guarantee these concerns will continue to receive adequate consideration in the future because they are my own concerns as well.
At the same time, I understand that a lot of people come here just looking for useful and informative content, or maybe a chill community with some open-minded members, and they end up getting an extremely harsh initiation just because they make a wrong post somewhere or stumble into the wrong forum. It's easy to get a superiority complex and feel like it's somehow our job to weed these people out, or show them that the real world won't pamper them, or teach them that the internet isn't actually serious business. And I agree that we don't want a bunch of crybabies and drama-queens all over the site. But I don't like seeing that principle abused to haze and harass innocent victims, or push their buttons and troll them in an attempt to coerce the unwanted behavior. I think many of these new members may have a lot to offer, once they just get a feel for how things work around here and grow a bit of a thicker skin. They should not be treated by veterans like expendable commodities to be toyed with and discarded. We are starting to gain a reputation as a site full of assholes.
So those are my personal concerns and motivations. If I had to give a mission statement in one sentence, it would be something like: "turn back the growing culture of hostility and arrogance on the site while staying true to our goals of providing an open and unrestricted community".
You may think the new rating guidelines are ham-handed, impractical, or overreaching. Fine, I'll even agree with you. It is not elegant and it does not address the underlying problem. But our main concern was just to get some rules on the books to deal with explicit and obvious cases of malicious abuse. I don't want people to worry that this is the beginning of a premeditated effort to forcefully stamp out all negativity on the site through increasingly intrusive measures. My personal long-term goals for the future do not involve more rules, they focus on improving our setup to accommodate the various ways in which people use the site.
For example, I would like to take a more bottoms-up approach towards managing the community. We should allow anyone to create new forums and customize them completely. Make your own rules and access restrictions, assign your own mods, manage things as you see fit. If people don't like your forum, they can split off and create their own. Make it easy to search, explore, and find these forums, and subscribe to ones of interest. Offer users the ability to combine multiple forums into a single "metaforum" to get a unique blend of topics, or consolidate similar subjects, or combine a bunch of low-traffic forums together for easier navigation.
We'd do away with general ratings, and instead encourage people to use 'plus' and 'minus' buttons to to give feedback on the quality of individual posts. Mods could configure this feature at a granular level to control who is allowed to vote on posts in their forum. Besides helping us highlight the best content, this could also be used to determine "forum ratings" for each user based on their post scores. So for example someone could have a good rating in Mushroom Cultivation but a bad rating in Political Discussion. A sitewide rating would probably still be available, but it would be de-emphasized.
If you constantly downvote a particular person's posts, we could prompt you to ignore them. If you constantly upvote someone's posts, we could prompt you to add them as a friend. Then based on your upvotes and downvotes, we could recommend other forums with users and posts we think you'll like.
We could also improve and emphasize the ignore functionality as a way to filter out unwanted content. It could be possible to publish and share your personal ignore list, and automatically ignore the people your friends are ignoring. Anyone could maintain a public ignore list which members can subscribe to, like "Trolls and Assholes", "Butthurt Hippies", etc.
Those are just a few ideas, and anyway this is not even in the discussion or planning stages yet, it's mostly just personal brainstorming. Our immediate attention is focused on getting the site's hardware upgraded so we're not down or frozen all the time. But I hope you guys realize that we all just want what's best for the site, and my ideas are mostly about being more open, customizable, and user-controlled, with less micro-management from the top. I'm glad people are passionate about the site, but I feel like some of you guys are wasting too much time worrying about theoretical concerns which will never come to pass. We have a pretty good track record of listening to feedback from the community, and iterating features until we get them right. I hope you'll give us credit for that, and be a little forgiving and understanding of the occasional bump along the way. We're all just humans doing our best, ya know?
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Elementium
Friendly Neighborhood Lurker




Registered: 12/06/06
Posts: 658
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Re: Ythan [Re: Ythan]
#12372061 - 04/11/10 10:53 AM (13 years, 10 months ago) |
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That just blew my mind.
That concept has the potential of being the holy grail of forums community, or the most convoluted mess ever created.
Genius.
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lukeboots
fresh futuristic

Registered: 02/04/04
Posts: 19,728
Loc: Grand Ole Operating Syste...
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Re: Ythan [Re: Ythan] 1
#12372202 - 04/11/10 11:35 AM (13 years, 10 months ago) |
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Ythan, your brainstorming sounds really amazing.
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funky ass music: Planet of Dinosaurs // Rich Whiskey
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deCypher



Registered: 02/10/08
Posts: 56,232
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Quote:
We are starting to gain a reputation as a site full of assholes.
Source? Great ideas BTW Y.
-------------------- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
 
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jewunit
Brutal!


Registered: 01/11/07
Posts: 34,264
Loc: Ohio
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Re: Ythan [Re: Ythan]
#12372581 - 04/11/10 12:50 PM (13 years, 10 months ago) |
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Someone really likes Reddit.
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geokills
∙∙∙∙☼ º¿° ☼∙∙∙∙


Registered: 05/08/01
Posts: 23,466
Loc: city of angels
Last seen: 2 hours, 49 minutes
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Edit: I composed this post before realizing that Ythan had already submitted a lengthy discussion. Had I seen his post, I probably wouldn't have bothered to type this one out, as indeed, the ratings issue by itself has been worn into the ground. I am however very excited to hear Ythan's ideas for a reorganized forum structure that will cater more effectively to individual users by providing information suitable to their individual tastes and filtering out that which is not.
He first mentioned these ideas (providing the example of Reddit) a week or two ago, and I really like the way he has extrapolated upon them. 
Quote:
LogicaL Choas said: ...as the Announcement said, people tired of getting zero's for no reason [...] argued for a new system. I think most people think its because of the Mods and Admins getting together and saying "Hey, we need to change this" but in fact its the users who complained about it.
Sounds presumptuous to me. In fact, the mods and admins did (and do) get together to discuss a myriad of concerning issues all the time. There are always discussions taking place in our moderator forum about all sorts of policy related matters: how to best handle situations, how to organize information, what direction a given forum should take, what features should be added or removed, calling out inappropriate moderator behavior, and ultimately taking an active interest in caring for the community and making this an interesting, valuable place to spend time for a lot of people.
Quote:
NickSoapdish said: The root cause is not addressed, because the root cause is the maturity level of the members here, something which is out of the admins' control.
You are correct, but only to an extent. There are thousands of members on this website that do what they can to nudge the community in a positive direction. The moderators are no exception and indeed are prime examples of those who care tremendously for and wish to help create an active, engaging, informative and pleasant environment for other people to post. If the moderators and admins take it upon themselves to effectively enforce specific minimum quality standards, then it stands to reason that the community will tend to maintain a stasis at or above those standards. This is inherent, when material falling outside of our guidelines is removed and the offending members lose access to their accounts.
Quote:
Members have been given the choice to opt-out of the ratings system. I think opting-in means being vulnerable to all uses and abuses of the system. The system is inherently flawed, which is why people can choose not to participate in it.
The ratings system will always have imperfections and loopholes. Trying to patch them up periodically doesn't work, because it does require some restriction on free speech and new ones inevitably pop up anyway.
While the administration I am certain believes in the value of personal freedom, there will always be respective venues where some behaviors are accepted and some are not. We make changes with the idea that they will help to foster and nurture a vibrant, thought provoking and welcoming community. Some work, some won't, but there is nothing wrong with patching up systems in an attempt to improve them, even if they will never be perfect.
I was once very resistant to change in all aspects of my life, but have worked to free myself from such constant discomfort. Things will change. I'm sure a lot of you have heard the saying that "the only constant in this universe is change". Life becomes orders more pleasurable and satisfying if you can learn to embrace it.
I understand and have embraced that the Shroomery will change as it grows and ages. I won't like all of these changes, but I can be discerning in deciding which ways my energy may be effectively used to help shape the change that is yet to come. That's all we're doing here, and while I clearly see that a lot of you have trouble adapting, I know that many of you understand our intentions and I thank you all for your support and participation here in our community.
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-------------------- ┼ ··∙ long live the shroomery ∙·· ┼ ...╬π╥ ╥π╬...
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Vibes
Good Vibes



Registered: 07/07/09
Posts: 3,384
Loc:
Last seen: 9 years, 7 months
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Those sound like great ideas. I have yet to see a community with such a variety of features and such an awesome community. I love you guys.
Thank you both for the detailed answers.
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Good Vibes
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Society
Mmmm... pizza



Registered: 07/03/04
Posts: 14,300
Loc:
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Quote:
Mr. Cypher said:
Quote:
We are starting to gain a reputation as a site full of assholes.
Source? Great ideas BTW Y.
No source discussion, Cypher!
-------------------- Delicious Pizza
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adrug

Registered: 02/04/03
Posts: 15,800
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Re: Ythan [Re: Ythan]
#12373328 - 04/11/10 03:03 PM (13 years, 10 months ago) |
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Fucking bravo, Ythan. Great post.
And here's the question I want to ask after reading this thread. If ratings are (as some of you say) so very unimportant and inconsequential, then why are you guys getting so worked up over this? It is inconceivable to me. Things like this are just another reason why I find myself purposefully distancing myself from the forums.
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lukeboots
fresh futuristic

Registered: 02/04/04
Posts: 19,728
Loc: Grand Ole Operating Syste...
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Re: Ythan [Re: adrug]
#12373367 - 04/11/10 03:11 PM (13 years, 10 months ago) |
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That's the same conclusion I came to after a minute, adrug. This is about the biggest amount of nerding out I've ever encountered in my life, on my part and others. My initial distaste for the "new" ratings (blah blah blah) was just that it didn't seem like a very clear new outline and I figured I'd just get banned easily so I expressed my worries (then I got banned (my fault), haha). After thinking about it for a minute though, it's all for the better, and it really, really doesn't matter.
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funky ass music: Planet of Dinosaurs // Rich Whiskey
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Cactusdan
Patecatl



Registered: 10/11/07
Posts: 7,024
Loc: Oregon
Last seen: 3 years, 3 months
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Re: Ythan [Re: adrug]
#12373410 - 04/11/10 03:20 PM (13 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
adrug said: Fucking bravo, Ythan. Great post.
And here's the question I want to ask after reading this thread. If ratings are (as some of you say) so very unimportant and inconsequential, then why are you guys getting so worked up over this? It is inconceivable to me. Things like this are just another reason why I find myself purposefully distancing myself from the forums.
QFT
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idiotek


Registered: 02/06/04
Posts: 40,728
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Re: Ythan [Re: Ythan] 2
#12373979 - 04/11/10 05:27 PM (13 years, 10 months ago) |
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Excellent post and points. This is why you've remained ahead of the pack in these mushroom/drug forums, the ability to stay dynamic and realistic.
I know it seems like I argue for the right to troll, but it's mostly just a kneejerk reaction to the blanket statements made by people who appear to want to erase all negativity or start some kind of unrealistic drug utopia on the internet.
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