K5 Meta-Thoughts
Jan. 4th, 2001 02:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ocelotOriginal: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/1/4/4727/33762
Decided to make this a seperate entry from my general diary entry, since my diaries tend to be excessivly long anyways.
Currently, the focus of K5 is the moderation queue. Most of the discussion takes place while stories are in the queue, except for the rare story that actually makes it to the front page.
Some ideas:
Don't allow topical comments while the story is in the queue. The drawback of this is that I know I've voted up or don't care on stories I otherwise wouldn't have because I see that they're generating good discussion. (rusty has just informed me that there is a similar idea in the works. GMTA)
Lower the posting/deletion threshold, or change the algorithm, pushing stories through the queue faster. I assume that this is probably in the works as well, since it comes up fairly frequently.
Is there some way to examine the stats of stories posted since the current system was implemented, and see if there's an average point where if it gets more than x percent of yes votes as opposed to no votes, it usually gets posted/dropped? (Did that make any sense whatsoever?) That might be interesting to look at.
Perhaps wait until a certain percentage of k5ers have voted, and post or not post at that point based on the results. I guess that's kind of the way it is now, since you have to wait until there are a minimum of $posting_threshold number of votes before it is posted. But it's different somehow. I'm tired, so I can't think of exactly how this is :)
I also think that they should get rid of the +1 front page option, and determine whether something should go to the front page based on some ratio of yes, no, and I don't care votes. The thinking being that a generally well written article that reaches the posting threshold, but gets a lot of I Don't Cares, probably doesn't have the general appeal that would be wanted in a front page article.
That said, I personally like the idea of a customizable front page, and don't feel that it would fragment the community *too* much (as efn fears), providing the number of categories was kept fairly limited.
Actually, I'd go for an entire layout change, where it's focused around the most active stories (regardless of age) rather than the newest.
I'd also like to see an entirely subjective rating system, where the ratings don't really effect the site as a whole. Where each person has their own personal rating for posts they haven't yet rated based on the ratings of others who rated posts the same as them in the past. Sort of like Amazon's "People who liked this book also liked..." type thing.
This would basically eliminate the need for mojo, and therefor eliminate mojo whoring. There would still need to be some sort of accountability in place, and I'm not sure how that would work. This method could concievably lead to more people rating posts (since they'd need to rate somewhat regularly in order to establish their web of trust), but it would also lead to more subjective ratings, where people could vote 1 on a post simply because they don't like the writing style or whatever without having to worry about negativly effecting the poster's mojo, so it couldn't as easily be used as a basis for determining an user's trusted status.
On the downside, I can see this method of rating leading to an even greater fragmentation than customized front pages, since it could lead to people paying closest attention to the views they generally agree with.
I suspect it would also be rather resource intensive.
I'd like a way to hotlist diaries so that I could, say, hotlist the diaries of people I liked, and there would be a box which would show the last x number of entries from those people (in addition to the box that shows the last x entries from the general population). That would greatly help to reduce the annoying feeling that I've missed something that I get whenever I see all unread diaries in the list :) I'm also sure that there is a way this theory could be applied to the site as a whole, but it's escaping me at the moment.
Also, a mandatory max-length of the intro copy, or at least details on the submission page explaining the difference between intro and extended copy, would be nice. I hate it when half the diary page is taken up by one person's entry :)
In any case, some greater amount of control over what appears on the diary page would be nice, since as it is, it's terribly open for abuse, as there is no way for people in the general community to deal with problem posts.
Anyways, I'll shut up now, as I promised my boss I'd take care of some stuff before tomorrow, and it's now 1 AM and I'm getting quite tired.
Decided to make this a seperate entry from my general diary entry, since my diaries tend to be excessivly long anyways.
Currently, the focus of K5 is the moderation queue. Most of the discussion takes place while stories are in the queue, except for the rare story that actually makes it to the front page.
Some ideas:
Don't allow topical comments while the story is in the queue. The drawback of this is that I know I've voted up or don't care on stories I otherwise wouldn't have because I see that they're generating good discussion. (rusty has just informed me that there is a similar idea in the works. GMTA)
Lower the posting/deletion threshold, or change the algorithm, pushing stories through the queue faster. I assume that this is probably in the works as well, since it comes up fairly frequently.
Is there some way to examine the stats of stories posted since the current system was implemented, and see if there's an average point where if it gets more than x percent of yes votes as opposed to no votes, it usually gets posted/dropped? (Did that make any sense whatsoever?) That might be interesting to look at.
Perhaps wait until a certain percentage of k5ers have voted, and post or not post at that point based on the results. I guess that's kind of the way it is now, since you have to wait until there are a minimum of $posting_threshold number of votes before it is posted. But it's different somehow. I'm tired, so I can't think of exactly how this is :)
I also think that they should get rid of the +1 front page option, and determine whether something should go to the front page based on some ratio of yes, no, and I don't care votes. The thinking being that a generally well written article that reaches the posting threshold, but gets a lot of I Don't Cares, probably doesn't have the general appeal that would be wanted in a front page article.
That said, I personally like the idea of a customizable front page, and don't feel that it would fragment the community *too* much (as efn fears), providing the number of categories was kept fairly limited.
Actually, I'd go for an entire layout change, where it's focused around the most active stories (regardless of age) rather than the newest.
I'd also like to see an entirely subjective rating system, where the ratings don't really effect the site as a whole. Where each person has their own personal rating for posts they haven't yet rated based on the ratings of others who rated posts the same as them in the past. Sort of like Amazon's "People who liked this book also liked..." type thing.
This would basically eliminate the need for mojo, and therefor eliminate mojo whoring. There would still need to be some sort of accountability in place, and I'm not sure how that would work. This method could concievably lead to more people rating posts (since they'd need to rate somewhat regularly in order to establish their web of trust), but it would also lead to more subjective ratings, where people could vote 1 on a post simply because they don't like the writing style or whatever without having to worry about negativly effecting the poster's mojo, so it couldn't as easily be used as a basis for determining an user's trusted status.
On the downside, I can see this method of rating leading to an even greater fragmentation than customized front pages, since it could lead to people paying closest attention to the views they generally agree with.
I suspect it would also be rather resource intensive.
I'd like a way to hotlist diaries so that I could, say, hotlist the diaries of people I liked, and there would be a box which would show the last x number of entries from those people (in addition to the box that shows the last x entries from the general population). That would greatly help to reduce the annoying feeling that I've missed something that I get whenever I see all unread diaries in the list :) I'm also sure that there is a way this theory could be applied to the site as a whole, but it's escaping me at the moment.
Also, a mandatory max-length of the intro copy, or at least details on the submission page explaining the difference between intro and extended copy, would be nice. I hate it when half the diary page is taken up by one person's entry :)
In any case, some greater amount of control over what appears on the diary page would be nice, since as it is, it's terribly open for abuse, as there is no way for people in the general community to deal with problem posts.
Anyways, I'll shut up now, as I promised my boss I'd take care of some stuff before tomorrow, and it's now 1 AM and I'm getting quite tired.
