jSnively

I've closed this thread.

We have a political forum where you guys can express your opinions. Please take a little time to read over our commenting guidelines if you decide to continue this conversation there. We have left both positive and negative comments in this thread for the sake of balance. We encourage you to use the like/informative buttons (only available to registered users) to show your support for either position.

This is great news for AppleTV Games.

SpamSandwich said:

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Should posts which do not receive an "Informative" up-vote be presumed to not contain helpful information? Again, it bssically boils down to a wholly subjective determination on the part of the button pusher and limiting the array of responses to only so-called positive ones is manipulative and does not serve the community of posters.

Why in the world must a person who holds a contrary opinion be forced to ignore or type a response, whereas the person who agrees has the option to select from two positives? It makes no sense. Perhaps every poster should receive a credit of 100 points and they receive more Happy Points if they type out a response, but they lose a point if they only click a button? 

If the idea is to keep people coming back to discuss, argue and be exposed to advertising, shouldn't they be incentivized to add more good content to the forums?

All these questions have been answered already in this thread. I know it's a big of a slog to go through so here's a TLDR:

1) Because negative feedback is more affecting than positive, and discourages further interaction. One of the reasons the dislike button is so prone to abuse is because of how low friction it is. In our case it created an environment that was hostile to new users, and only served to increase tribalism. Over half of the traffic to these forums comes from new users. It's crucial that we be able to entice some of them to participate if we want to keep them healthy over the long-term, and maybe even grow them.

2) Positive reinforcement is a good feedback mechanism to keep users returning. Reducing the friction there is optimal since there's little downside to the interaction. It's not perfect, but it's a decent way to make newer users stick around longer and post more.

3) Ads don't factor into this at all. We run the forums as a value-add, not a revenue driver. I think we break even on server costs, but not if you factor in the man hours. We're a small team, the time I spend responding to this post means something else currently isn't getting done.

This has all been borne out by the data we have since the change, we're pretty much green across the board. The handful of users in this thread are not representative of the larger trends on the forum. The people abusing the 'funny' button was way smaller than the people abusing the dislike. The people who are now abusing the 'inf' (which seems to be mostly localized) are an even smaller set still. We know who you are, isn't not hard for us to look ; )

We're going to continue to monitor things, but I think this will be my last post on the topic for a while. You guys are encouraged to continue to discuss; I've seen some okay ideas in here. If something gets said that is compelling we will take it under consideration or maybe chime in. We have heard your feedback and responded in what I believe to be a fairly open manner. However, this is starting to devolve into a few users who have really dug their heels into the sand, and I'm not sure anything we say at this point is going to be productive.

When we have more information or updates then I will post here again. Otherwise I'll see you guys on the forums at large.

williamlondon said:

jSnively said:

williamlondon said:

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Is that really going to be your response? It's like I've come to MacRumors by mistake, but I quit there years ago because they are a horrible website that panders to trolls and promotes people who post shit and cause problems. You are listening to the wrong people when you think you are doing the right things lately, you should know that strongly.

Wait, so let me get this straight...

Your assertion is that when I ask someone to stop who is literally text-book shitposting, that means that I am promoting people who "post shit" and cause problems?

No, pretty much it's all of your decisions lately, but most recently it's the extremely unprofessional conduct of you in this public thread.

This button fiasco is a huge fuck up of monumental proportions, and you keep trying to control it by committing more and more wrong decisions. You need to understand that removing the dislike button was a *bad* move, that's fundamental.

I can understand how you would think that from the limited context of this thread, and the concentrated 'negativity' of a few posters. The metrics, however, in the month or so since the change, do not support your conclusion. I said at the beginning of this that I was more than happy to restore the functionality after a decent amount of time if it wasn't working. The further measures that have since been taken (removing funny, for example) are an effort to better positively tweak the solution or nip some bad trends in the bud before they're allowed to escalate, not to repair any damage removing the button has done.

As for my professionalism, my response to Spam was a little knee-jerk and I'll own up to that, I could have just deleted the post for violating the rules and left it at that. I really don't like deleting posts outside of the news threads though, I'm not trying to hide the discussion. Outside of that I don't see where I've been anything but extremely accommodating to a small set of users. I get that not having access to all the data (and no we're not going to post public numbers) puts half of the discussion at a disadvantage, but that's just how it is. I explained clearly in my original post the reasons for making the decision to remove the button. None of that has changed.

williamlondon said:

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Is that really going to be your response? It's like I've come to MacRumors by mistake, but I quit there years ago because they are a horrible website that panders to trolls and promotes people who post shit and cause problems. You are listening to the wrong people when you think you are doing the right things lately, you should know that strongly.

Wait, so let me get this straight...

Your assertion is that when I ask someone to stop who is literally text-book shitposting, that means that I am promoting people who "post shit" and cause problems?