I think you’d make a good mod. I see the spirit of the questions you ask above and I think you put the right interpretation on where I’d like to see things go while highlighting some of the practical difficulties.
When a thread cools off or dies might be a good time to decide if it stays and to collect the votes. If it dies it goes to “off topic.” But no more editor mods coming around with the coitus interruptus and Freudian slip citations, wrap on the knuckles for stuttering etc. There is a bit of shaming and power tripping going on. There’s no room for that in a mature friendly forum and it violates the spirit of SAFE. Stop people who troll and are out to hurt the feelings or sensibilities of others, that’s fine but no damn grammar Nazi type mod policies or behaviors. Opp, prove to me you haven’t contradicted yourself, prove to me you’re being consistent. That has to end.
If someone wants to say something stupid let them say it without it setting off the quality discourse alarms. We don’t need people going around trying to measure other people’s noses. Its not a contest.
Maybe as a thread aged there could be a tab function that would take people through the points that were ultimately deemed to be on topic in easy succession without cutting up the any continuity the tangents provided if people wanted to explore them.
I think one thing missing from “discourse” forums is a suitable reply system that would allow some off topic discussions continue and the reader is able to collapse that whole side discussion that is not furthering the topic (directly).
Without that feature we have a problem for some and not for others. That is for instance members who wish to learn about exchanging coins go to a suitable topic on the subject, and they really don’t want to wade through 20 or more reply posts about political economics to find out the answer asked previously and perhaps miss the answer post half way through the interesting (to some) discussion on politics and its relations to crypto.
Are you able to suggest a compromise that allows both objectives (1. learn, 2. free discuss) to exist in harmony without asking the political discussions be done in another thread. Understanding discourse while good doesn’t seem to facilitate the reply inline & collapse feature
I am not able to. But as I mentioned elsewhere I don’t trust discourse, but I guess there is a difference between a site that wants you to sign in under their system and a site that simply uses their software. But I’ve noted I (sample of one) can’t sign into this site now from Tor which to me suggest spyware and tracking in a way that can’t be shut because if you don’t enable it you can’t log in for comment. In my prior experience discourse was used on sponsored media sites where they didn’t want to much criticism of their sponsored spin, and where they wanted to let you know they had an eye on you and possibly to enable PR shills.
More than a year ago there was a time when there were two SAFE sites and they closed the more advanced of the two. This one is still pretty good except for this new thread editing business.
Wait, as you post this I think recognize a feature recently implemented. The collapsible response features in the thread do what I was thinking of above, possibly with mods having to go back and set this up or collapse the tangents out of the main line of the thread argument? Or possibly every reply to yields a collapsible and every general reply continues the thread. I’ll read up on the flat threading. But in recent use if where I have expanded a collapsed section of a thread I tend to see the same posts in serial a little further down which is slightly disconcerting.
Yes, I am starting to see its power. Maybe not so bad. And yet I wish even without going to another linked thread there were a way to collapse a loop within the thread that could be expanded to hide what might be an interesting aside for some in a thread without having to disrupt the the flow of the thread or create new linked thread. But still pretty good.
This is indeed the crux of the matter - and thank you @Warren for bringing this discussion point to the table . There are two definitive schools of thought when it comes to forum threading - outlined in the link that @neo posted. Since Discourse implemented a “flat-threaded” model, discussions that wander off topic are not very useful as references nor as live discussions. There are a few features that the Discourse devs have introduced to facilitate the viewing of threads, but there can really be no true marriage between the flat-threaded model and the hierarchical model.
This is the reason why some of the moderation may seem heavy-handed at times - unfortunately it is a necessary trade-off.
For my part, I believe that the Discourse model is the correct model for this site - at least among the implementations that exist today. Many singularly-focused forums (ours is “The SAFE Network”) do benefit from this type of model, as it leads to both easily index-able threads as well as constructive, focused discussions. This allows not just the “best” reply at each step in the conversation to be followed, but all of the responses that could have legitimate points to be shown.
A hierarchical structure would facilitate off-topic discussions that happen as a natural offshoot of the original topic. This structure is better suited for sites where any topic about any subject is welcome, and off-topic discussion is the norm. This is not the case with this forum. One reason for this is that it facilitates vying for the spot of the “best” reply at each step in the conversation, which has the potential to obfuscate subsequent posts.
While I believe that off-topic subjects that naturally evolve out of existing discussions are absolutely beneficial to the health of the community in general, moderators are already in in possession of the tool to facilitate these discussions. The ability to split topics to other threads is a great way to keep the original threads clean while maintaining valuable discussions that otherwise may appear off-topic under the original thread. As well, Discourse implemented the collapsible “reply” feature and the “reply as linked topic” to lead users’ thought process towards this way of thinking while navigating forums such as these.
So, while the ability to view a thread in a hierarchical fashion - and the benefits to off-topic conversation branches that such a setup would provide - is not available in Discourse, it does provide moderation tools as well as tools for the users in order to facilitate the clean, organized forum structure that is beneficial to the discussions that take place here.
Interesting to read their reasons, but I disagree with them after experiencing this forum for over a year. The problem with the “Reply as linked topic” button is that the need for a linked topic only becomes apparent after it’s already too late. Then it’s up to moderators to fix the off-topic mess.
What I don’t understand is why not give the user both options? The underlying data structure is simply a tree of replies, with the OP as the root. It’s all a matter of presentation. A simple toggle could switch between representing a topic in threaded or chronological form. All user devices are easily fast enough to sort on date.
Anyway, I actually have a technical design for a decentralised forum on SAFE. I already have a proof of concept in JavaScript code. Moderation becomes a service in that model, a user can subscribe to one or more other users to inherit their ignored users and hidden posts lists. So there is no fundamental distinction between a user and a moderator, everyone is his or her own moderator by default, and can choose to allow others to adopt him or her as a moderator. There will still be notifications in the actual topic when a post or a user is ignored by one of your moderators, so you can click on it to show the hidden content anyway. If it turns out you disagree, you can just ditch the moderator(s) in question.
I hope that communities will self-organise under such a model, where very active users with sound judgement naturally evolve into popular moderators. They could even ask a small SafeCoin fee in exchange for their lists if they would want to do so.
Anyway, you’ll see it in action once SAFE is live and we have an API that provides access to StructuredData types. It’s all client-side code, so it’ll naturally be open source. If it works out as well as I hope, we might want to try to start our in-SAFE ‘SAFE Network community’ on that model.
That sounds like a feasible way to organize discussions decentrally, I really like that idea. Just want to add, that there is actually anything in SAFE that would inherently contradict with centrally moderated communities. I´d love to see Discourse on SAFE as well.
Definitely, it would actually be fairly easy to adjust the JavaScript code to add mandatory moderators, including the ability to truly delete a post rather than merely hiding it from view.
The most fundamental quality of what I’m making actually isn’t decentralisation, but serverlessness (is that a word?). It’s a purely client-side rule-based protocol. It can be used for any form of communication really. The base data structure is a tree of messages, the protocol describes how they are linked, but the root owner (website owner) can decide what qualifies as a valid message.
Can’t wait to use it…good stuff! Great to see community members are actually interested in exploring new ways of running forums/modding, contrary to earlier remarks.
