Good post. I didn't answer, that's my choice.

Go TOD ! Let's speak our mind !

I like it as is, but I'd like it even more if we could filter poorly ranked comments. At this point, I'm trying to get a small farm jump-started (just in case...); I don't have time to wade through as many comments as I did a few years ago. Anything that helps to remove chaff is welcome.

I really appreciate the ability to collapse comments, for example. Now, if I could see the comment ratings on the collapsed header, and filter out the -5 or less, life would be goo-

Well, life wouldn't be good, but it would be a little better.

I'm chagrined to say that it quite dramatically changed how I view comments. I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to scroll down to find the comments with the most negative or positive ratings and then read them. I just couldn't help myself. Is there a way to turn on/off the ratings, so that I could choose when I want to see them?

Thanks for letting us weigh in, and I hope you have time to read the comments about it under other posts.

I like to listen, learn and share. To me, the rating system introduces an element of...judgment, I guess you'd say. And this changes the focus from listening. For me, it's both what I'd call an "orientation" distraction, and a visual distraction.

Otherwise I would've voted in the "happy to ignore if it makes others happy". I'd first like to know more about "What is the happiness it brings?"

I hope I can opt out. Of course, by doing so, I may be (de facto) opted out. (Of course, I may be anyway.)

I'm curious about what people like about it, and also curious what problems Super G and/or others are having that the rating system addresses.

It would help if could view number of negative and positive comments, so could see the comments that are controversial. At present 0 could be no interest or 30 positive and 30 negative.

The first day this system was implemented, I looked at the ratings and participated in moving them up and down. Now, I almost completely ignore the ratings because I really have no interest in them. They are just part of background noise. To the extent that my attitude is widespread, they will be of little value as the ratings will be done by the few people who, for some reason, have the ability to rate.

So, I hated the ratings and now really don't give a damn. I would just as soon they go away and don't think they have much use. I didn't check the "if it makes happy block" but if it makes people happy go for it as long as you don't ban people because of it.

If I could turn it off, I would. I find it visually distracting.

I also fear that it could turn this place into a popularity contest. I already notice a kind of groupthink, where ratings seem to be positive when the voter agrees, and negative when the voter disagrees. It doesn't necessarily indicate the value that a post adds to the discussion, so it is not really trustworthy. I'm inclined to think that the potential benefit is diluted by these drawbacks.

I like the way actively disruptive posters have been called out, and that their posts have such wide variation +ve/-ve shows that it is, generally, the post that is being considered not the poster.

So it becomes a useful tool.

However, I don't like the way it draws so much attention. I suggested before that the results should only be visible o the staff and poster. Someone said that defeated one of the objectives of filtering, which is true, and I'm not sure how to resolve that.

I still think it is proving it's value - hell I think drumbeat comment is already improving in quality a little in some regards - but I a;so think it's massively intrusive. Even if it were hidden from public when under say +-5 it'd help.

I think the theory that it would lead to suppression of differing opinion has been fairly solidly shown to be false - HOWEVER there are indications that those with staunchly expressed minority opinions are more likely to get a down arrow when there is something minor wrong with their post (like being unclear wtf they're on about, or unnecessarily sarcastic), resulting in possibly unfair -2s and -3s.

i don't like it. it will just make it a popularity contest while at the same time preventing actual discussion. it's easier to mod someone down because you don't like their opinion rather then try to prove them wrong.

I love TOD but it is getting too cluttered...

I need a way to filter out badly rated posts. It would also be nice to be able to filter outer certain posters.

Also, if only the first X levels of a thread were opened default, that would be nice.

We got to do something to cut down the clutter.

Some good thoughts here.

My controversial idea is that the privilege of rating comments is reserved for those who help us out by digg-ing and reddit-ing our stories.

Are you getting the hint yet? ..we really want more of you to make a habit of it so that we get up to critical mass for it to take-off. These networks really do bring lots of new eyes to the site which means more influence and more reward for our hard work.

Phil.

I have found that most comments don't get rated at all and I have not felt the need to vote on comments. I think it is a distraction that doesn't really add anything to the debate. However I think Super G has fantastic snazzy technical skills and more web polls like this one would be helpful to the editors and posters of what areas of content are either neglected or are overdone.

Thanks for trying, SuperG, but I see it as 'way worse than useless as it now exists.

The most trenchant and undeniable point has been made multiple times by others: it doesn't distinguish the controversial from the vapid.

My other reactions, in no particular order, include:

- the anonymity allows those who can't or won't articulate their own thought process to vote, as they might in a gladiatorial contest. I have always valued this site for its fair approximation of real-time peer review based on substance.

- there is no way to enforce any "ground rules" on the use of arrows, so there won't be any. Popularity of poster? Popularity of the idea? Quality of the argument made? Scientific cred? Political correctness? I think there will be a large WTF? factor.

- there are some quite bright posters on the list whose thoughts, even if well-expressed, will not be immediately accessible to everyone. They will tend to slip through the cracks more with such a system in place, I think.

- I don't even want to KNOW what sort of score my own posts receive. What is one supposed to do with that sort of feedback? And living in Hawaii timezone and not getting to the site until late in the day, anything I might post would start with a huge "time penalty". I can ignore it, and will (though NOT to make others happy, that's a disturbing notion on a couple of levels), but the "time zone thing" applies to a lot of folks. There will be a tendency not to post. This may indeed cut down on the number of total posts, but perhaps in favor of early halfassed ones and at the expense of later substantial ones.

Y'know, I've just deleted several other comments, and will summarize instead by saying it's self-evidently a bad idea in this incarnation and will probably diminish what makes TOD unique and useful.

Sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn't.

Something is necessary , there are so many comments lately there needs to be some way to sort them, but this system just doesn't work.

How about a system where there is a button where we can mark a comment as irrelevant, spam or off topic, essentially black marks. Enough black marks and the post disappears. Only users with account more than 6 months old allowed to black mark. Abuse the system and your account is canceled.

I voted for the "I don't like it now, but I might like it if improvements were made" choice. I don't think the rating system is useful unless there are ways in which we can set up our account to filter out low-rated comments. Slashdot is a good model of how this could work. At the moment, the commenting system seems kinda pointless.

Any interest in a way to show only new comments? Would require a bit of savvy for context, of course.

Single page blogs do get out of hand. Forums have the advantage of breaking down content to a page at a time; perhaps there's a way of applying that here as well? That'd be far more interesting/useful to me than this rating system, which I'm staunchly ignoring.

The subthread collapse feature doesn't really do it for me, either; usually a thread has so many discrete sections I wind up having to spend more time collapsing them all than it takes to just skim over them in the first place.

I suggest eliminating half the site complexity introduced - - the "bad" half. Just have "up" arrows. Drop the "down" arrows. It seems that that the stated reasons for using the "down" arrows are a little difficult to carry around in your head and, from what I've seen there's a temptation to use them as "I disagree."

Some other method might be explored to deal with abusive comments (ad homs, etc.) - - some blogs have abuse report buttons.

Best hopes for civility and self restraint.

I largely ignore it, but I did notice it yesterday when I was in a minor tiff with another poster. He got some pretty negative ratings for a pretty negative post, which at least gave me the sense that others were also taking his comments as unhelpful.

Want to call that a popularity contest or just being PC? Maybe, but it seemed the votes were used for the right reasons to me. I didn't use that as a victory lap or anything, though, since I was really looking to see if I was getting negatives for my posts in that exchange, which I did not. Sometimes I think the accusations of Groupthink are confusing the rejection of real 'opposing views' with the rejection of unrepentant belligerence .. which is not the same thing. Being a jerk is not evidence of 'independent thought'.

Knowing how tempers run sometimes, I'm sure there are frivolous votes cast, and people probably are reacting to posters that they do or don't like.. I did hit an UpArrow for Alan Drake's question of whether to post more news on LightRail Stories, etc, since I thought that would give him the feedback he was asking for.. while often enough I don't give any special weight to the rating number, since there are so many reasons it might have been knocked up or down.

I did like the suggestion of showing both the number of ups AND downs, or some way of showing the activity of a particularly contested article. Maybe a graph? Ahh, Feh, Data-shmata..

Bob

I think rating comments in general only makes a website elitist and suppresses dissenting opinions.

These are two things that I think are exactly opposite to the goal of analyzing information and presenting a true, balanced, result.

They have grown on me. Anything with high numbers of comments - either direction - tends to be interesting or at least salient. It helps scroll through faster. I still scan to not miss something useful but not getting a lot of notice, but I can scan faster.

Also, it's an interesting social experiment in what we can expect as times get tougher: if this group cannot cooperate to use this system as intended and continue to play favorites and gotcha games, then there's precious little hope for surviving the current mess intact.

Cheers

I like the new rating system but it needs filters and additional metadata. Look at Slashdot and do likewise.

You know, the funny thing is, the people who get any sort of bump up or down will be the ones people read. That means that the trolls and lunkheads will get what they want and the high and mighty will feel all warm and superior pushing the little down arrows.

Way, way too much like American Idol.

Just let people talk. If you don't want people you don't like posting, just go ahead and bless a few souls with the TOD imprimatur and give them the keys to the printing press.

That this site would be so concerned about the opinions that clash with the politburo approved line is beyond sad.

If you think yourselves so damned important, just close the doors to the clubhouse and post your own little views. No harm, no foul.

Those who don't agree with you will find something else to do.

Jeez. Like junior high school around here.

I'm new to TOD. I've visited a few times in the past, and I started reading regularly a few weeks before the rating system went into effect. Once I started reading it daily, I gained a twitch in my right eye. All said, there is too much content to read on a computer screen during a day. I appreciate the attempt to filter through the content, but I believe the rating system glosses over other more fundamental structural problems. I hope you take this as constructive criticism...

1) Especially in the drumbeat posts, new primary topics are introduced by readers far along within the comments. It's distracting to be forced to rescan the same list of comments throughout the day to find new relevant links to timely links on the web.

2) Comments have a family approach, which is helpful in an archival sense. However, this forces me to scan through the entire body of comments seeking what is new. Subscribing gave me a new tag which highlights new posts since my last login, but the sheer amount of data makes it where I often cannot cover all the new material in one sitting. The next time I load the page, the new tags are reset. I'm back to manually skimming for relevant info.

3) The rating system is aimed at tagging/sorting the content to make it easier to find what stands out. Does it measure quality or the poster's ability to follow posting rules? It seems mostly devoted to popularity, which is fine. TOD should officially state that it merely measures user sentiments. I also believe it would be more useful to show totals of up and down votes. A post with 30 up and 35 down is probably worth reading before a post with a total of 5 down.

4) I'm put off by the mods deleting off topic posts. Is the comment section for all comments, or is it meant to reflect the views of TOD management? This seems arbitrary. It would be better for the reader and more conducive to discussion if the mods harvested the best posts to place in the opening section rather than deleting a few (seemingly random) posts from the comments area. It would benefit the casual reader to see the mod endorsed content up top, and it would benefit the community to have the freedom to discuss freely in the comments section.

5) While I can appreciate grouping conversations for archival purposes, it is really annoying that I can't login to view only new content to a comments thread. So much scrolling and searching... With this volume of content, TOD becomes like a forum lacking the fundamental forum structure. It makes it difficult. Especially in the drumbeat, maybe comments should be tied to the individual articles in the main post. If one article is about sour crude and I'm uninterested in that topic, I could easily avoid reading those comments.

I really enjoy TOD, and the Drumbeat is one of my favorite bits. The main post followed by comments doesn't seem to work for the drumbeat. Especially for this area, I think the rating system is inadequately glossing over more fundamental problems of data management. I want to keep reading the site, and I hope you come up with a content organization solution before I go blind trying to read it all (over and over and over in the case of the comments). The ratings system is useful, but it doesn’t accomplish this goal.

1. Well, I quit reading comments in most DrumBeats, because I couldn't filter fast enough. This rating system helps a bit, but it's not enough - although I don't have a solution to what would be enough. I agree that TOD NEEDS A GOOD FILTER!

Expandable Sub-threads, for instance? With there own "value"?

2. What is being measured by voting? Probably something different for each voter. That needs to be somehow defined!
Like/don't like
Agree/don't agree
On /off topic
I learned/learned nothing
you're on to something/nothing
etc..

Cheers, Dom

how about a forum? or a good search?

i hate loosing a thread because theres too much good news.

• Step 1: forum.
• Step 2: rating system.
• Step 3: ???
• Step 4: Profit!!!

[Edit - 6:07 PM] Interesting ... I checked back earlier and my silly /. reference was rated -1. Now it's back up to 0. So I'm still karma-less :(

I no longer read Slashdot and rarely look at DailyKos. They have become entrained in a current of groupthink. But I don't think that is the fault of their karma systems, it's just a matter of overcrowding. Without rating systems, those sites would be reduced to a usenet level of flamage in very short order.

I enjoy the rating system. What I fear is regular posters like Darwinian, Westexas, Leanan, Alan from the big easy etc...change their content to get votes, be it conscious or subconsciously. Whatsmore, the rating system can marginalize the optimists like Antidoomer. The great part about this forum is the diverse set of opinions and debate, sometimes fiery. The danger of a rating system IMO is ability of the group to wrap their tentacles around an individual.

The voting seems to be in favor of the rating system. I just hope the commentators and contributors don't become more PC for votes.

I posted my suggestion here:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4176#comment-364888

In short: Letting all users mod all the time invites impulsive modding based on agreement. If the mod system is more like slashdot, people will think more about how they use mod privileges when they have them. Random selection ensures that the system is still democratic.

If moderator points and filtering were added to the comment rating, Drupal would be at the technology level of Slashdot in 1998. If it generated static pages rather than refreshing from the database continually and used memcached like Slash, the pageloads wouldn't be so painfully slow. The problems of scaling this type of dynamic site with group comment on stories were solved and tested a decade ago.

The downside of Slash over Drupal is that it requires root access to the server to maintain and install and it's all carved out of Perl, which makes installation and maintenance a bit of a black art and you can't host it on a $10/month shared server. This become unimportant with high traffic sites and dedicated support personnel with proper training.

Consolidating and extending a few of the thoughts here, another potential concept.

Lots of folk seem to think that the 'up' and 'down' should be independent, and that I think makes sense - even from the original post the reasons we are told to vote 'up' are not the opposites of the reasons why a 'down' might be appropriate.

So how about:

One Mojo/Kudos/Hi5/WarmFuzzy button that just counts, and separately a button for 'breaks guidelines' which (bear with me here) pops up an option-list or dropdown where the down marker has to identify WHICH guideline has been broken (Trolling, Attacking the poster, unsupported/unsupportable statements of 'fact', off-topic, excessive quoting (copyright), promotion)

Then, display the counts, possibly with thresholds, but show the specifics to staff (identified) and the poster (anonymous)

That way, staff have all the 'evidence' necessary to deal with offensive posters, or continual fallbacks to evidence-free conspiracy theory, etc, and the poster knows exactly why people have an issue with their post.

Finally:

I had a left-field thought which may be technically infeasible and/or stupid - I wondered if the use of colour shades, rather than numbers, might be a bit more subtle in some ways, but more productive in others, and much less obtrusive. Palest red = one negative; Deep-Red = lots of negatives etc. It might avoid things like looking at a post over and over to see if it's gone up or down a score or two, such as some of us compulsives are inclined towards.

If you have extra CPU cycles then ditch the rating system and go back to showing total posts and NEW posts for each thread like you used to on the home page.
That would we much more useful.
It is hard trying to remember how many posts there were on a thread last time I looked and then try to determine if there are enough new ones to make it worthwhile to look again.
Thanks

I agree with the others who think the rating system could encourage groupthink. The mojo/troll idea upthread sounds interesting....but what I'd really like to see is to have the [new] comment tags stay where they are until an "Update" button is pressed, no matter if I navigate away or refresh the page. Also, have links open a new page (tab) by default. Is this feasible?

P.S. Thanks Super G for all the hard work.

Dear TOD.

Many people seem to want to maintain the rating system and 'improve it' into a full moderation where the comment that's rated down gets hidden or collapsed to a one liner. They think that TOD is 'improved' by filtering away comments based on democratic voting.

I think this is very short sighted policy which throws the baby out with the bath water.

What these people forget is that comments which people disagree with and thus are rated down are sometimes very insightful - they show us the common fallacies that people make, cognitive or emotional. They tell us what misinformation is our there or how people have misinterpreted something. They give us a chance to review our own thinking and develop better arguments - and sometimes, we might even find something in our own thinking...

I think one of the best tools of thinking is to play the devil's advocate. I encourage other's to do it to me and sometimes out of curiosity and amusement play it on other's to find out just how deep their thinking is. If you've ever attended a public defense of a doctoral thesis, you should know how essential this is to the development and maintenance of scientific thinking - always questioning, doubting, exploring...

Please let us not make the rating system into a 'democratization' of censure. TOD has inhouse experienced moderators who already remove most abusive, lame and commercial messages. Because these people are well known to us, have their reputations to think of, and have very limited time to pursue personal vendettas, their chances of abuse of the system are limited. Any 'improvement' of the rating system into a public moderation system will democratize TOD comments and lead to a mob-rule.

And anyway TOD hasn't increase in size yet to a point of being unmanageable to read which would warrant this sort of action to be taken. Therefore moderation or collapsing of threads is something to be left in the drawer for later use.

Sincerely, Ransu

I hate it so much I used the AdBlock Plus extension to block the ratings section so I don't even have to see it. For me, the TODBan greasemonkey script was very effective in blocking annoying people. But some of the changes to the comments section lately has caused it to stop working. If anyone has an updated version of the script that works, I'd appreciate a link.

What would be great, is for the user blocking to be built into the TOD website itself. Many other forums have that ability so I think it's a common need.

If the point of the ratings is to increase the readership, long term I feel you will lose more posters/readers than you gain. The system is based on an idealized democratic view, whereby the majority usually knows best. Controversial opinions are overwhelmingly rated poorly so far, in fact it appears that controversial opinions are actually rated lower than stupid, trolling comments. This has the result of giving the reader a poor opinion of the insight or lack thereof of the lurker community. IMO there has always been a shared view that TOD readership possessed a somewhat greater insight, as a group, than the sheeple. This new rating system works against that belief daily. OTOH I do feel the system will work well in creating a more homogenous readership group if that is the intention.

You need to keep the rating system?

Why? Remember Hotgar and MatthewD and a few others who basically had to be banned and forced out.

With a few high negative ratings some folks who may lean towards
Hotgarism and so forth might get the idea early on that others don't like how they try to make TOD their own personal sandbox and in doing so damage it for the rest of the readership.

airdale-just my opinion...I have others but mostly these days try to keep it more 'in the furrow'.

You haven't studied the huge difficulties of voting democracy have you? Votes are not all equal in merit.

The sort of people who are more enthusiastic about clicking on arrows will be the same people who are more inclined to click to vote in your poll.

When you look at the comments when the system was first introduced, it should be clear that there was a substantial preponderance of disapproval, and the reasons were quite cogent and not adequately dismissed.

This latest poll would have been more enlightening if everyone who voted had to simultaneously give their rationale too. You'd then have observed the large preponderance of half-bake behind the like-it camp's votes.

When I first discovered TOD and Peak Oil, it was exciting and fun to be in the know about something that it seemed like few others understood.

Today I participated in a poll asking if oil would reach $7 dollars a gallon by 2010, a year and a half away. 74% who responded said yes. I think the site was AOL.

Peak Oil and TOD are becoming main stream. Every gas price sign proclaims Peak Oil. Only the brain dead haven't figured out something big time is going on.

High traffic seems to be a goal of TOD. If it achieves that, it will not be the same attractive site it was before. It will have to appeal to the majority to maintain traffic just as newspapers and television do. The best days of TOD may be over.

The comment rating system uses some kind of browser widget (ActiveX? something else?) that does not work in my browser, so I am unable to use it. Even for trusted sites I do not enable ActiveX (security risk is too large, IMO), so I'm not sure if that is it or whether it is just that my browser is old and the voting is using some whizzy new technology (that will turn out to have a shelf life of about six months before becoming utterly obsolete and being replaced by yet another whizzy new technology, if experience serves :-). However, my whole PC is old and it still works fine in general, and I don't like to keep installing new browsers at the risk of making things no longer work fine. If the comment voting used a simple hyperlink to register the votes, it would work for everybody, regardless of the version of their browser, without forcing them to drop their pants down around their ankles and bend over in the security department.

Utopia in Decay
http://home.comcast.net/~kevin.cherkauer/site

Kevin Cherkauer