@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.

what i think would be a nice compromise would be to not mess with visibility of stuff on the forum when browsing the forum.. but perhaps enhance the search system to use tags and votes and q&a lists to provide a better search facility.

Points for everything.
Sounded relevant

another one, this time with actionable steps, and from MIT..

I never have thought it was about benefiting the end user - at least not exclusively.  In the end, most people want to find somewhere that they belong- and building a reputation goes towards that in large part.

When you think of the DC community, certain screen names, if not real life names come to mind.  Those have become associated with DC based upon interaction and reputation.  Not to say that this was self serving- in fact, it's just something that happens, and DCers tend to be more selfless than selfish.

But everything from titles to badges to post counts are the same sort of carrot type leading mechanism- to keep people invested in a particular community.

So, I've been looking at osqa. Thy seem to be cracking features at a good pace and they face the same issues with moderation and voting. The good thing is that they are not 100% clone, and since one can modify the code, one can have any variation on the voting etc (e.g., do away with badgets).

This type of site can definitely used for normal conversation or even announcement/blogging *example*

They seem to have the backing of http://dzone.com/. One of the most active users is Rick Ross, so I think the project will have a bright future. They released an (easier) install guide. I'll try to install it next...