On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 05:27 +1200, Steven Clift wrote:
> To Richard's comments ... one reason I like "Recommend" or positive votes
> is that with agree/disagree I am concerned with the political majority
pushing
> out the minority in our forums ... however, for most sites this would be a
nifty
> feature.
BTW, I just realised I don't think I said anything about agreeing or
disagreeing with the post. My suggestion was that you would indicate
whether you thought a post had interest value or not, which isn't
anything like agreeing or disagreeing.
To Mike's comments: to my mind this entire idea is about adding
relevance to the system -- at any given time there might be 600 posts
that could be considered to be 'new'. I have 5 minutes. Which posts
should I read? It has nothing to do with whether people agree with a
particular poster or not.
Things that don't help me: topics index (because it just tells me what
is new, not what is 'important'), posts index (even worse than a topic
index, it makes me skim through everything).
This is why things like Digg and Slashdot excel at satisfying the desire
to 'fill a few minutes with something interesting' -- things of interest
float to the top. I don't believe the same can be said of GS ... yet.
I would suggest that the 'interest' level of a particular post is almost
*always* tied to the poster -- whether it is because they have
expertise, write well or happen to be the person of the moment.
So yes -- I agree that things like the social status of the user (eg.
guest speaker) are strongly tied to this. Here's a basic proposal:
1. each post has a 'interest rating',
2. the 'interest rating' consists of various weighted values.
For example:
25% of the interest rating could be made up from the 'thumbs up/thumbs
down' rating.
25% from the number of posts made by the user who made the post in
topics *you* have participated in -- "Do I like to debate with this
individual"?
25% from a rating of the number of thumbs up/thumbs down *you* have
given the user who made the post
25% from the 'karma' value of the user who made the post.
The idea is that you get posts *you* are more likely to be interested in
highlighted, so that you're encouraged to participate (you haven't spent
all your time wading through finding something of interest, so you'll
have more time to reply).
