@Perry Mowbray - It's just my personal take on the beast. There's nothing to say I'm right by any stretch. But again, the
personal choice to use a piece of
technology to screen something
you don't want to see is what I consider a dangerous habit to get into. To my way of thinking, it encourages a certain mental laziness.
And once it starts screening things for you (sight unseen) based on votes cast by others you believe you can trust, it starts crossing into the realm of being a tool for groupthink. And it has the capability do just that. In fact, it's listed as a feature:
Posts voted below a given number are hidden. ("Bad posts")- and -
Members choose to either hide Bad posts, or grey them out, or none and display them normally.I mean seriously, what's to stop you from just blowing past the comments from people your experience has taught you don't rate more than a skim? The simple fact that GP/BP has a feature to
mask them seems to indicate there is a desire on the part of some (many?) people to be spared even that much effort.
Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. But I don't really think so.
Another problem I see revolves around the effect the "respect" scores can have on new or infrequent contributors. Such a system has a bias which favors established frequent posters. You can't build up your level of "respect" until somebody votes for you. But the people who have the screening feature enabled can't vote for you because
they may never see your post to begin with. All it would take is a few
trolls self nominated gatekeepers who make a habit of slagging new arrivals or have an axe to grind about a certain viewpoint.
So it has the potential to become a vicious circle that eventually places all the "opinion power" in the hands of a relatively small clique. Sorta like Orwell's
Animal Farm where "All animals are equal, but some animals are
more equal than others." And that's a big problem.
As
JavaJones pointed out, it's basically the Slashdot model.
