
Self policing for "delete me" posts - whacked_new

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whacked_new
There were some mistake submissions which got deleted from the front page.
They were immediately obvious as mistakes, but what if a dupe was submitted a
week later? a month later? ten years later? A dupe may leave and re-enter
relevance given the circumstances. In a different context, a dupe may not be a
dupe, even if it references the same information.

For the last two cases I saw, "delete me" works, but I find this self-policing
idea suboptimal. There will inevitably be users in the future who make mistake
submissions. If they are completely irrelevant, or carbon copies, fine. But if
they are submissions like "AMAZING PHOTO!", what if the user finds it
personally significant? As the size of the crowd grows, no matter how focused
your initial crowd is, or how you intially positioned your product, there will
be a scattering of interest. Unless you follow an editor and moderator model,
slashdot for example, you will be unable to filter your content to a specific
standard. In the case of an open-participation community, enforcing focus may
be excessive: after all, the community is defined by itself, not the
application it uses. If you gather more and more forgetful users, they may
appreciate dupes.

After you hit some sort of critical mass of users, many new users will arrive
by friend recommendations, or mere interest in the community size, rather than
independent discovery. Independent users join after searching for and spotting
something tailored to their specific interests, but there is no guarantee that
referred users fall under the same profile.

In interest of monetization, it should be hard for popular sites to escape
changing to accomodate a more diverse userbase. I believe this has hit both
digg and reddit. Sooner or later, with the rapid growth seen here, news.yc
also (which seems to evolve faster than the other news sites). In this regard,
plus 1 for slashdot model (editors plus moderators). python_kiss also observed
this on his project (interested in your thoughts). This also makes me question
the strategy of pre-defining and then trying to self-enforce a niche in an
open and user-driven website. Of course you can use subgroupings by topic, or
do something like Ning, but lurkers that never bother to customize their
preferences, whose numbers are probably significant, will be hard to please.
You might even have better luck with them by showing random stories than by
showing the most popular or most active.

Maybe the popularity measure has shown its limit in usefulness. Users come for
content quality, be that quality of information or emotion (flamewars give
belligerent folks an adrenaline boost); the quality is driven by a few. I
would come back here just to read the comments from a couple amazingly good
commenters. Those comments could spawn complete discussions by themselves,
like the questions from good panel moderators in conferences. More than
popularity, then, the submission rating should be influenced more by the
overall "quality" measure of the discussion. For example, in slashdot, you
look at the number of comments, then the total number of, say, +5 comments.
Usually it's something like, say, 10 percent. When it's significantly higher,
I anticipate a good read.

That reminds me again. Topic Karma is an interesting attempt. python_kiss? :)

~~~
BrandonM
I like your ideas here, but you might want to consider changing the title of
your submission.

~~~
whacked_new
good point. the title is pretty bad. not sure if the current one is any better
though, but it seems a little less confusing maybe?

for reference the old title was 'Better methods for filtering "delete me"
posts?'

and wow, there is a delete me post just a few submissions above.

~~~
BrandonM
I actually meant that you discuss several things besides "delete me" posts, so
I was thinking that maybe you would want a title which captures the idea of
all the things you discussed, such as evolving communities and the idea of
user moderators.

The new title is a little bit of an improvement, at least.

