
Posting Rules in Online Discussions Prevents Problems and Increases Participation - shrikant
http://civilservant.io/moderation_experiment_r_science_rule_posting.html
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vinhboy
I have a feeling this effect will soon be nil. The more subreddit sticky
comment rules, the more people will adapt to filter them, like the way we
ignore ads.

A lot of the subreddit I subscribe to have rules. I barely notice them
anymore.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
But if the rules are strictly enforced, then people generally stick to them.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
The rules also tend to be largely similar.

\- Be polite

\- Be on topic

\- Use approved hosting

So it is relatively easy for most of us to stay within the lines

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vacri
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I've seen two separate communities completely
fizzle out when rules were posted. These were smaller communities, with 20-50
people, though, and not reddit-size communities.

~~~
dageshi
There is a regular pattern I've seen with a lot of subreddits where they
initially start off being fairly lax in what they allow. Eventually the "old
timers" get bored of seeing the same types of content being repeated and so
they come up with rules for the sub. If the community is small enough this has
the effect of putting off new users from posting and drastically cutting post
volume.

If the subreddit is big enough on the other hand then this often improves the
quality of discussion and effectively reduces the amount of what the old
timers consider to be low quality content.

~~~
Noseshine
On a larger scale just look at Wikipedia and Stackoverflow and the discussions
and blog posts about how bad they have become especially for newcomers the
last few years.

Maybe a multi-layered approach could be tried, where people can choose to see
content on different layers?

Long-time users fed up with mundane questions only get to see "advanced"
posts, but beginners can still post a million "How do I (standard task)"
questions without bothering anyone else. Instead of trying to split the people
and direct them to different sites use layers. Same could be done with "funny"
content (reddit especially, where every attempt of a serious discussion is
swamped by 80% posts form people who don't really know anything about the
subject, don't care, and just want to be entertained).

So instead of trying to achieve what now seems to be impossible I think we
_might_ actually be able to find better ways to keep disparate users in the
same forum. The problem with trying to separate beginners and advanced etc. is
hat people _change_. What was a beginner becomes a an advanced user, but they
don't see that _they_ should shift to a different site for "advanced users".
After all, they've always been here! So sites like SO or Wikipedia seem to
have a natural tendency to eventually become more and more beginner-unfriendly
over time.

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stuartaxelowen
The problem is that everyone's post is "advanced", just like every bug is
priority 0.

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the8472
Then let others rate the complexity/novelty/nicheness? Of course asking users
to rate on multiple dimensions is a problem on its own.

It may come off as elitist, but it may also help to find newcomers things they
can contribute to. Similar to "good first bug" tagging on some bug trackers it
could also help others to filter out things they can help with or that are too
boring for them to bother with.

Efficient allocation of expertise is necessary.

~~~
internaut
Complex rating systems do not work. Even meta tagging on porn sites doesn't
work properly for that and they have the most avid searchers.

It would be better as a baseline to use the forum's memory as a filter for
each user instead of coming up with an objective standard for what is novel or
complex to them.

I also believe we can extend this forum memory concept by some kind of
generation of valid information (a sort of autotldr bot) to be inserted into
newbie threads. This bot could then be rewarded by users if it gets a 'hit'
because you're right at the point where somebody was helped out so you could
suggest a small payment of $0.10 or something. That would be a nice way to
scale the forum to large numbers of users and you could also reward the
sources of the original information so those users get credit for their aid.

~~~
the8472
> Complex rating systems do not work.

Yeah, that is my main concern too. Maybe instead of tallying up/downvotes
verbatim one could do clustering analysis on the voters. Votes by people who
have similar voting-behavior might be of more interest to a user than votes by
voters who have uncorrelated or even inversely correlated behavior.

> It would be better as a baseline to use the forum's memory as a filter for
> each user

Not sure what you're suggesting.

~~~
internaut
> Yeah, that is my main concern too. Maybe instead of tallying up/downvotes
> verbatim one could do clustering analysis on the voters. Votes by people who
> have similar voting-behavior might be of more interest to a user than votes
> by voters who have uncorrelated or even inversely correlated behavior.

That's the essential idea behind Amazon and Netflix recommendations so it is
quite workable.

>> It would be better as a baseline to use the forum's memory as a filter for
each user

> Not sure what you're suggesting.

I'm saying you have this massive haul of threads of which the majority are
never referenced because they happened in the past. Normally users need to
search this backlog but often don't know the right search keywords to begin
searching. Thus they ask the same old questions of the old-timers who become
crankier and crustier by the day because of this.

Since the same questions are asked multiple times you should be able to tally
the answers together into a cogent form in a similar way to the method that
autotldr bot uses on Reddit to summarize news stories.

Then you could present this information in a currently running thread that
appears to ask the same questions.

