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A Proposal for Improving Quality of News-Related Threads

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mouser:
Can I make a plea proposal to the forum?

When ongoing news or similar stories break, on subjects I don't understand well, I start coming across some great articles on the web by people who really know their stuff, and there tend to be a half-dozen or so really good analysis essays that come out in the days surrounding a breaking story.. or some good round ups.

As much fun as it is to have a long thread back and forth, usually among people who are reading about the issue elsewhere, what i think would really be useful to a lot of us, especially for putting this stuff in context and being able to keep up with it, is if one or two people who were interested in an issue when it comes up, is to start a thread and keep the first post updated with a collection/roundup of these top insightful serious writeups about it by trustworthy knowledgeable sources.

Often when I'm making the newsletter i get depressed that we don't have a good authoritative thread on some issue that happened in the last month, collecting clear links to good articles were people can learn more.

This gets back to the idea of trying to make an effort of making threads that can serve as ways to learn about an issue..  Not every thread has to be like that of course, but I really feel the lack of them sometimes.

If someone visiting our forum really wanted to learn a breaking story i'd have to tell them to go elsewhere -- we simply do a very bad job of creating threads that will help people learn about a breaking issue.  I wish we could fix that..

I think all it would take is when someone sees an interesting story that they are going to be following, create a thread whose purpose it is to comprehensively collect links to articles/essays that do a good job of exploring it.

Instead, what we tend to have is a thread with one link to an item and then a lot of back and forth random insider talk and noise, and an occasional useful link scattered in there.


I guess the bottom line is that I'd really like to see an effort to mix the insider one-liner back and forths with an effort to make the first post in the thread a kind of definitive balanced informative summary of the topic with links to good trustworthy articles to learn more -- an effort to make that first post a resource for learning more and updated nicely formatted list of of links to the latest articles, etc. With a good subject title that was easy to find and identify, etc.  So that if someone said, i am interested in news event X, they would be able to easily identify the thread that's going to discuss that issue, and in the first post find all the links they need to go read about the story from all angles and educate themselves.

Yes, it takes more work to make such posts.  Yes they are less fun to make.  But it's the difference between this forum being a small clique of people bitching to themselves vs a place where everyone can learn about issues.


Sorry for being so grumpy today, i'm just in a mood  :(

mouser:
Let me try to be a littler more concise and concrete:

Can we try to think about making Definitive threads on issues? Where the first post is made by someone who intends to follow an issue, and will keep the first post updated with a good balanced summary of the issue and an updated annotated list of links where they can read the best articles on the issue from different sides?

With that in place, i think the discussions that follow will be better, and new people will be able to inform themselves and then join in.

TaoPhoenix:
I never got that impression that it was noise Mouser, I think the Dialectic is Alive and Well! Stories come out in waves, and a big ticket topic takes over two months to play out, so the early stories full of "breaking news" sound silly when the next week's update comes out.

I think this is what forums do well - people respond with the next parcel of the conversation as they see it, quoting for extra credit when their jump point is four points back. Perfect would be a Mind Map tree, but forums can only be linear.

As a super raw example, this *year*'s story is Edward Snowden, and he did (what? I'm lost...) a few things right that kicked his story over the top into mainstream news where now as a direct corollary these encryption stories are coming out, and of course that affects tech professionals. (Look for contrast how they just barely had enough old school clout left to bury Bradley Manning.)

So I'm not so sure a Mega Post of 15 links is quite the right answer either!

TaoPhoenix:
Let me try to be a littler more concise and concrete:

Can we try to think about making Definitive threads on issues? Where the first post is made by someone who intends to follow an issue, and will keep the first post updated with a good balanced summary of the issue and an updated annotated list of links where they can read the best articles on the issue from different sides?

With that in place, i think the discussions that follow will be better, and new people will be able to inform themselves and then join in.
-mouser (September 11, 2013, 11:58 AM)
--- End quote ---

We posted ours at the same time.

I don't think there IS a definitive thread until MONTHS or YEARS later!!

I think it has to thrash out as necessary messiness.

mouser:
Yes but what I'm asking for is for the first post in the thread to be kept updated with new information (and collected links from followup posts); that way the first post in a thread is a sort of constantly updated table of summary and list of reading material to inform the pages of discussion posts that follow.

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