http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=1219196

Following on from previous discussion on this topic...

Problem:

In the eye of the public (that is, not-logged-in visitors), the apparent quality of the site can be significantly dragged down by answers (or other replies) which are esteemed by the voting population to be notoriously poor.

Proposed Solution:

Within threaded views of discussions, hide from Anonymous Monk any replies with a sufficiently low negative reputation.

Details:

In the threaded view of a post within a section such as SoPW, and within the threaded outlines displayed by RAT, any reply with a reputation below a given threshold will not be displayed. (This has the effect of hiding the entire sub-thread rooted at such reply as well.) This feature would only affect Anonymous Monk. Proposed threshold: -7.

This would not affect any node being viewed "directly", only replies under it -- regardless of that node's type or reputation. It also would not affect root posts being shown in RAT.

FAQ

Q. I want to see every reply, even low-rep ones. Does this affect me?
A. No, as long as you're logged in.
Q. Ok, suppose I'm Anonymous Monk. Can I opt out of this "feature"?
A. No, as long as you're not logged in.
Q. Ok, then are these "very bad" replies completely inaccessible to me?
A. No; you can still get to them via other normal means, such as Search and Super Search, and direct links.
Q. What about in Newest Nodes? Will these "very bad" replies be hidden there as well?
A. Not under the current plan. That's a more "raw" interface, and isn't particularly useful for visitors trying to get a view of a "question" along with its "answers".
Q. I think a node would have to be much worse than -7 to merit this kind of treatment.
A. That's not a question. Here's a question: What threshold value would you suggest?
Q. This sounds like reaping but without the process. Why don't we just let the reaping process handle this problem?
A. The criteria for reaping are fairly strict. Simply having abominable technical merit (for example) is not sufficient grounds for reaping. Yet these are not strangers to our land it may still be desirable to shield the eyes of innocent visitors from such content. That's all we're trying to do here. Once you've signed in at the front gate and picked up your meal chit, all content is laid bare, just as always, no matter how bad.

Other thoughts on this idea? Alternative proposals?

See my update below.

I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors -- suggestions
by Discipulus (Canon) on Jul 25, 2018 at 07:46 UTC
    Hello jdporter and thanks for your work,

    while this is a good idea I have some humble suggestions. First I'd like this new feature to be available also to logged users, better if controlled via user settings.

    Second I do not like the complete invisibility of these post: I'd prefere an advice like This post and the eventual replies to this post are not shown because of the poor quality of it's content followed by a link to the original content and a link to this policy.

    About the treshold: perhaps a fixed negative number it's not the best idea. Infact a node with +30 -37 in my opinion is not automatically a bad node. It's a very controversial one not necessary a bad one. I imagine nodes about perl6 as an example of this kind of nodes. So perhaps some kind of formulas is better: maybe making positive nodes votes more heavy can serve: (pos * 1.2 - neg) < -6 or something like this. In the above example +30 -37 will lead to -1 and nothing will happen; but +25 -37 will lead to fade out the post ( 25 * 1.2 - 37 = -7 ).

    My original idea was to decrease the font size of such nodes, as exposed responding in the thread Re: Let's Make PerlMonks Great Again! -- font size you for sure remember. Lowering the font size and put a tag like This post is in lower font size because of low consideration of the content or something like this is, imho, a better solution even if not easier to implement.

    Anyway thanks

    L*

    There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
    Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.
      There needs to be an absolute and relative filter. If there is only a relative filter, and a node has only 1 vote, negative, the node is filtered.

      Instead, set a vote minimum, perhaps 10. If there are less than 10 votes, and the sum is -7, filter the node.

      If there are more than 10 votes, then use a formula, like:

      if (($count > 10) and ($sum / $count < -0.2)) { filter(node); }

      -QM
      --
      Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

        If ... a node has only 1 vote, negative, the node is filtered.

        It's impossible to have a rep of -7 with only one vote. :-)

        I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.
Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by jdporter (Paladin) on Jul 31, 2018 at 20:43 UTC

    Update:

    A big "thank u!" to all who wade in. All of your ideas are greatly apreachy8ed.

    As of this moment, the feature is implemented as follows:

    • The threshold is fixed at -7. That is, replies with rep -8 and below will be affected.
    • In threads, a reply below the threshold is replaced with a notice:
    A reply falls below the community's threshold of quality. You may see it by logging in.

    Other implementation details are as before.

    Updater:

    1. VBN are now hidden (blanked) when viewing directly. This is to help prevent trolls getting auto-feeded by merely looking at their own nodes. It might also help with VBN getting cached by search engines. (Not likely, but every little bit helps.)

    2. The threshold is now -4 rather than -7. We don't seem to have the critical mass to get -7 routinely on Very Bad Nodes.

    3. Extremely Bad Nodes — those with a rep of -9 or lower — are now hidden from logged-in monks of level 1 and 2 (Initiates and Novices).

    I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.
      VBN are now hidden (blanked) when viewing directly.

      Thank you for all your work in implementing this! In this case, perhaps it would make sense to replace the node with a message like This node falls below the community's threshold of quality. You may see it by logging in. ? Seeing a blank node has caused a little bit of confusion.

        Done.

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jul 26, 2018 at 09:14 UTC

    Whilst I applaud the desire -- its one I've long held; and attempted by other means -- and especially your effort; I can't help but think: too little, too late.

    To address the "Too little" part; I think any posts 'judged' -- by whatever mechanism is chosen -- to require 'some action', should be pre-fixed and post-fixed with a banner reading:

    Warning: This post has been judged by the Community to be of low value; which means it could be misleading or outright incorrect. Treat accordingly!

    And I think it should be applied to posts regardless of whether the viewer is logged in or not. Just because someone bothers to sign up and log in, does not mean they should be expected to have the requisite knowledge to discern pertinent posts from sundialisms.

    And yes, I am very aware this will catch many of my own posts, including some recent ones that I believe gained their reps for the 'wrong reasons' -- ie. political rather than technical. So be it.

    For the 'too late' part; it speaks for itself.

      My original suggestion was to have it appear similar to a reaped node, with a message like your example, where someone would actively have to click through to be presented with the post. This was intended to prevent search engine indexing of garbage and require the user to click a link to subject themselves to the content in question.

      "And I think it should be applied to posts regardless of whether the viewer is logged in or not."

      Good idea.

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by shmem (Chancellor) on Jul 25, 2018 at 17:53 UTC

    tl;dr - I think this would be a bad decision.

    Long version:

    I think that exposing all nodes reputations to everyone would be the way to go.

    A node's reputation is currently invisible until a vote is cast for it - except for those listed in Best Nodes, and Worst Nodes for logged-in users, which is unaccessible to Anonymous Monk.

    So, Best Nodes shows node tallies even to Anonymous Monks, while the negative counterpart is hidden from them.

    I guess that this policy is meant to prevent the decision on how to vote on a particular node from being biased by the node's actual tally; and to prevent Anonymous Monk to add negativity upon negativity (in the sense of further trolling and flaming). Furthermore, presenting nodes without their reputation avoids prejudice and places the burden to make an educated decision on voters, making it impossible for them to follow the "main stream" based on a number.

    Which burden they already have, and showing a node's gathered votes doesn't take away that. In all my time on PerlMonks there only have been a few cases where I cast a vote and was revealed a contrary number after the fact, which prompted me to re-read and reconsider the node. In even less circumstances I would have chosen otherwise after that, and then I wished to have a chance to re-cast the vote. After all, these votes ain't for an election and, the same way as we are allowed to edit nodes after the fact, we should be able to express changes of opinion or educatedness or whatelse with our thumb ups or downs later.

    So, in short, these points:

    • hiding negatively reputed nodes goes against free speech
    • I trust in anyone I don't know to make an educated guess about a nodes value the same way as I do
    • if showing any node's reputation is perceived as nudging, so is showing only Best Nodes to Anonymous Monk and hiding nodes being voted upon negatively
    • susceptibility to nudging is a personal choice, and if it isn't for somebody, there's nothing we can do about that
    • the perl monks endured people like Intrepid, sundialsvc and others with great patience and no harm done to the community
    • OTOH being presented with a node's title and its negative reputation could probably prevent somebody from opening its body, which could be a loss for them in one way or another, unfair, preventing free speech etc - but it is up to anybody themselves what to do being presented with a bit of information, and how to react

    So - don't hide bits of public discussion, rather reveal more bits to it. Privacy is a whole different thing I want to add, just in case.

    In any case, I think that adding "this node has negative reputation" to, rather than hiding a node, would be a better choice. We are constantly educating ourselves and others and, if necessary, by bad example also.

    updates: corrections in speling and such

    update:

    Hiding subtrees: Don't! because answers and discussions to/about a bad node might contain valuable information and interesting subthreads worth reading.

    perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'

      Thank you, shmem, for your very thoughtful and detailed reply.

      I guess that this policy is meant to prevent the decision on how to vote on a particular node from being biased by the node's actual tally; and to prevent Anonymous Monk to add negativity upon negativity

      Well, no. The idea was as I stated in the OP. It's about protecting, in some measure, the overall "quality" and reputation of the site in the eyes of the wider world, by hiding from Anonymous Monk (which would include folks following hits from google, for example) the worst of the site's content.

      That being said, it could possibly also have the effects you stated. It would, ever so slightly, "break the wall" of invisibility around each node's rep before voting. But is this really such a concern? It would require more than a little effort on a monk's part to discover that a bad node has a rep above or below the threshold; and then what?

      It's worth pointing out that we already have ways in which this kimono is partially opened — in particular, with ordering of replies by reputation. I don't view this cloaking as particularly sacred. Is it really?

      hiding negatively reputed nodes goes against free speech

      As others have said -- this isn't really true. If you want to make an argument along this line, you'd better attack reaping first.

      the perl monks endured people like ... with great patience and no harm done to the community

      Unfortunately, I don't think you're right on either count. Anyway, we as a community have a right to protect ourselves from the effects wrought by bad actors, and this proposal is an attempt to do so in the least intrusive and disruptive way.

      it is up to anybody themselves what to do being presented with a bit of information, and how to react

      There is a substantial difference between how logged-in users use the site, and how (we suppose) random drive-by visitors use the site. The present proposal is based on the presumption that the latter are mainly looking for good technical content. In this light, we would actually be doing them a service. If you want to see all the content, grab a nametag and come on in.

      Privacy is a whole different thing I want to add, just in case

      Okayyy... What is your point? Privacy is generally not a concern here, since no one is required to use real names nor any other "PII". The main privacy element I can think of is private messaging between monks. Does that factor into this somehow?

      I think that adding "this node has negative reputation" to, rather than hiding a node, would be a better choice.

      Thank you; that is an excellent idea. We could style a very negative note in such a way that says "this reply has been deemed of very poor quality by a consensus of monks" or some such.

      Hiding subtrees: Don't! because answers and discussions to/about a bad node might contain valuable information and interesting subthreads worth reading.

      Theoretically, maybe. But be honest: When's the last time you saw a reply to a very low-quality note contain matter of worthy technical merit? It's very rare. Such subthreads almost always consist of bashing the author for continuing to post garbage, etc.

      I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.

        shmem bows politely. Retorting thanks.

        The idea was as I stated in the OP. It's about protecting, in some measure, the overall "quality" and reputation of the site in the eyes of the wider world, by hiding from Anonymous Monk (which would include folks following hits from google, for example) the worst of the site's content.

        I was referring to the introduction of this policy in the first place: whom are node tallies to be shown.

        As for the overall "quality" and reputation of the site in the eyes of the wider world, the contents of this site speak for themselves, as does every node (speak for itself), and every monk does. This site doesn't need to boost its reputation in the eyes of a wider world - the reputation is in the eye of the beholder, in short: I don't care really, and I personally am against (tongue in cheek) shenanigans to boost PerlMonks acceptance: it wouldn't be a monastery any more ;-)

        About free speech -

        As others have said -- this isn't really true. If you want to make an argument along this line, you'd better attack reaping first.

        No. There's no need to "attack reaping". The rules for reaping a node are well established: a node has to be considered, voted for reaping by a significant amount of insiders, and NodeReaper isn't sent to do his work by an algorithm, rather quite sensible folks do that afaik. SPAM and such aren't free speech, since they are no speech at all. We could start to argue what speech is and when, but that would prrobably go beyond the scope of PerlMonks.

        Anyway, we as a community have a right to protect ourselves from the effects wrought by bad actors, and this proposal is an attempt to do so in the least intrusive and disruptive way.

        Yes, and we did that - as a community - in the most friendly and peaceful way (exceptions prove the rule) as long as PerlMonks exists, and my argument is that we need not any further restrictions, except security for our site and fellow monks.

        My argument is that there is no such thing as "effects wrought by bad actors" at this site, as long as "bad actors" and their utterings are visible, and their doings aren't carefully crafted psy-ops. But that is a whole other theme, which doesn't make sense on a technical site devoted to a computing language. As said, even bad advice is educational in my eyes.

        There is a substantial difference between how logged-in users use the site, and how (we suppose) random drive-by visitors use the site. The present proposal is based on the presumption that the latter are mainly looking for good technical content.

        Substantial difference based on supposition isn't far from prejudice, sorry. At least a very weak argument presented as is alone.

        I'd say that random drive-by users use the site basically for the same purpose as regulars: seeking, and (Anonymous Monk probably to a lesser extent) providing technical content, since this site has little more to offer. The main difference between Anonymous Monk and regulars is that the latter are able to keep track of their doings for whatever purpose.

        In this light, we would actually be doing them a service.
        Not really. Absolute vote tally is dependant on overall interest on the topic, amongst other factors, so votes don't really say anything reliable about technical quality. If that were so, and if votes would be cast only dependant on technical merit, you'd probably be right. But there's no way to isolate technical from social stuff in each voter, let alone for the whole site. See the infamous Quantum Weirdness subthread.

        Privacy is a whole different thing I want to add, just in case
        Okayyy... What is your point?

        Point is "just in case". It is generally not a good idea to add more data than needed to a public discussion. I added this only to prevent this discussion from trailing off into something else. *Sigh*.

        When's the last time you saw a reply to a very low-quality note contain matter of worthy technical merit? It's very rare.

        Agreed, and I vaguely remember occasions, but I won't dig into that. But since your proposal is about an automatism without human interaction, I thought that this possibility is worth mentioning. Imagine somebody posting the ultimate solution for world peace based on pure perl, seven hawks downvote that, and then it is shunned from all but regular monkses.

        perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'

      "the perl monks endured people like Intrepid, sundialsvc and others with great patience and no harm done to the community"

      I'm very familiar with this situation, and you are one of the many who have kindly spent considerable time correcting their posts over the years, as you know, it makes no difference. The same garbage keeps getting posted, regardless of who addresses the situation. The assumption made is that people stick around to read the rebuttal. And to be clear, the nonsense will still be here, it just won't be displayed to non logged in users, and indexed by search engines. There's no evidence to support your claim that no harm has been done do the community, nor to refute it. Do I feel like their behaviour dragged the place down? Yes. In terms of effort wasted correcting the same nonsense again and again to no avail. A drain on the energy and time which could be better spent elsewhere. Reputation wise has the site suffered? I don't know. They have their own websites, could start a livejournal (if such a thing still exists, if not insert modern equivalent) for their LARPing or whatever crazed ramblings they want.

      hiding negatively reputed nodes goes against free speech

      No it really doesn't. Anyone, even Anonymous Monk, may post whatever they like. Their post will be accepted and will be displayed to any logged-in user. What it goes against is broadcasting seriously dubious content which is precisely how things should be.

      Where I live there is a so-called "watershed" such that the TV and Radio broadcasters are restricted by the government from broadcasting material of an adult nature (violence, porn, swearing, etc.) until 9pm. This is not a curtailment of free speech, it is merely an attempt to protect some of the audience (the children) from material which may cause them grief. If you still want to hear/view it, just wait until 9pm and there it is.

      In a similar manner, if anyone wants to read such poor content on PerlMonks they merely need to login.

      The rest of your points could be argued but this one is just false IMHO.

        No it really doesn't. Anyone, even Anonymous Monk, may post whatever they like. Their post will be accepted and will be displayed to any logged-in user. What it goes against is broadcasting seriously dubious content which is precisely how things should be.

        Careful. There is no broadcasting involved here. Any information which leaves this site is polled, not pushed - it is up to the recipients which parts they retrieve. The analogy to Radio and TV is flawed. This site is more like a public library with private and public gathering zones attached... well, more like a Monastery ;-)

        What use is a Speaker's Corner if, at the arrival of the senventh disagreeing with me, I am (or my words which count at that) are removed from said corner and can't be heard anymore, except for a handful of insiders connected to me anyways?

        For plain off-topic things, ad-hominem attacks and such we already have the consideration process.

        a similar manner, if anyone wants to read such poor content on PerlMonks they merely need to login.

        As I tried to explain, even poor content is educational in its own way. And then, there are many ways in which some content might be considered to be poor, reflected somehow in the vote tally, which is by any means collectively subjective. Establishing a number of negative reputation as a measure of quality isn't something I can agree upon.

        Then, there might be a significant amount of Anonymous Monks which just don't want to sign in anymore based on past experiences. Abigail-II comes to mind. And they might provide valuable information to nodes voted negative on purely technical merits (which should always be the case in some sense of purity), and providing this valuable information on a technical basis.

        perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'

      I agree with shmem. Hiding/suppression is not a good idea.

      I don't think a voting majority amounts to an assessment of quality and a negative majority is even less reliable.

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Jul 25, 2018 at 23:12 UTC
    ++

    I see no philosophical issue with requiring authentication to see crap nodes. Plenty of content is behind some type of wall. Free speech is not guaranteed venue speech. There are hundreds of nodes I’d love to see disappear from Google results and I believe it would be of benefit to the monastery and to a smaller degree Perl.

    Update: awkward sentence fixed.

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by hippo (Bishop) on Jul 24, 2018 at 21:29 UTC

    I think this is a positive step and I am in favour.

    One suggestion for (very minor) improvement would be to have the threshold be -$NORM instead of the fixed, arbitrary -7. Other than that it's a total winner. Good work!

      Yeah, I was thinking vaguely of something along those lines as well. But I don't think using -$NORM is quite what we want, because that would mean that as the average node "quality" goes up, we become even more tolerant of even worse nodes. Instead, how about maybe something like -20 + $NORM. That would result in a threshold of -10.3 today. To put this in context: such a threshold would result in having no nodes posted today hidden, but all of this week's worst nodes of the week hidden (and then some).

      I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.

        Obviously, a node with a positive reputation should not fall under this rule.

        If you're going to use a formula like that, I would lobby for clamping to negative: $NORM<20 ? -20 + $NORM : -1;. Otherwise, if our $NORM quality spikes suddenly to 25*, some poor schmuck who "only" got +4 for a mostly-unnoticed post for some "Re^9" gets his reply hidden.

        *: okay, probably not likely with modern Best Nodes scores... but the idea is that I believe positive-voted nodes shouldn't be evaluated as "very bad", and so protection should be built in against that admittedly-unlikely event.

        that would mean that as the average node "quality" goes up, we become even more tolerant of even worse nodes.

        That only holds true if the actual mean quality increases. If $NORM goes up (or down) purely as a function of how many votes are cast in total (which it will), then using -$NORM seems perfectly rational.

        Instead, how about maybe something like -20 + $NORM.

        That also suffers form the same problem as just using -7: it puts an arbitrary fixed point into things which becomes problematic if $NORM changes greatly from where it is today.

      Perhaps we should consider the distribution of the votes and hide posts with rating in 10th percentile and below. The number 0.1 is subject to discussion, of course.

      Pro: no need for complicated formulae based on $NORM. Contra: it still may not mean what we think it means.

        Any node with replies will have replies in the bottom 10%. I don't think it makes sense to hide these if these have not gathered a significant amount of downvotes.

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by Tux (Canon) on Jul 26, 2018 at 09:02 UTC

    Having followed this discussion over the past days, and tried to understand all pros and cons, why not - instead of hiding the post (and its descendants) - just insert a bright red/black/whatever message in a somewhat bigger font claiming

    This post is considered bad content

    Or whatever is considered (pun intended) bad by the voting system (whatever formula is used)


    Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn
      Without hiding it this would only motivate some to collect this "message" as a badge of honor.

      I also think a mark (for logged in users that is) should have a more neutral wording.

      Assuming that its "bad content" depends on the POV, that's why I suggested "Disputed:" (which fits into the "Reaped:" model)

      Cheers Rolf
      (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
      Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

        This thread is officially discouraged.

        We don't discourage all threads, but when we do, we discourage this one.

        Even these threads are better than this.

        We'll tell you what threads to use and what threads not to use.

        threads can be improved faster than this one.

      Good idea :)

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors ( DISPUTED )
by LanX (Saint) on Jul 25, 2018 at 09:46 UTC
    Good idea!

    But I think it should be consistent to avoid confusion.

    AMs can still read "bad" posts by navigating the thread or via newest node° and some will start to complain why RAT is "broken".

    A solution could be to flag those posts visibly, maybe with a red link explaining what is happening.

    Like including something like

    DISPUTED!

    in the posts head or title. (It's a self explanatory link)

    Cheers Rolf
    (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
    Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

    °) or googling ...

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by Perlbotics (Archbishop) on Jul 25, 2018 at 16:31 UTC

    Good idea. Would it be possible to just tag the bad nodes, i.e. <div ... class="badnode">, when logged in? That would allow to customise the appearance individually using CSS.

    EDIT: Thus, censorship or not is kept an individual decision.
    Suggestion for default CSS: Don't hide and don't mark.
    Offer sample CSS or a configuration item in Display Settings, i.e. .badnode:before{ content: "Disputed: " }

    If it is acceptable to just hide the content from AM (it's still in the source HTML), tagging might be good enough to reduce the implementation workload to just tagging plus CSS. However, search engines (and notorious HTML source readers) might still find bad nodes. Not sure if this is an issue, though.

      Nice idea! Good point, though... We wouldn't want robots to see this stuff either (e.g. Google).

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by mr_mischief (Monsignor) on Sep 18, 2018 at 17:12 UTC

    I don't stop by PMD that often. I'm sorry for being late to this thread.

    I've always appreciated that sites like Slashdot and Soylent News have a threshold I can set for when I do or don't want to be exposed to the worst quality/reputation posts. It defaults to fairly low and can be adjusted either direction by the user. I think that makes quite a bit of sense.

    I also think it makes sense for Anonymous Monk to have a threshold that excludes the lowest reputation nodes by default and stays there. They can still find ways to drill down to all nodes. They can log in if they want to customize it.

    The solution in this thread I consider a variant of what I've found so useful elsewhere. Thanks so much for the work.

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by roho (Bishop) on Jul 26, 2018 at 20:41 UTC
    I think this is a very good idea and should be implemented.

    "It's not how hard you work, it's how much you get done."

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by trippledubs (Deacon) on Jul 26, 2018 at 04:52 UTC

    Minority held viewpoints should be just as respected as one held by the majority. They are marginalized enough by threads being sorted by node rep. Free speech is not something for the monastery alone, let the wider internet see it too, warts and all.

    People love getting internet-indignant. I thought that was the whole appeal of the --, to get the feeling you are doing something about it. Log in, oh visitor, that you may smite this wrong answer that you just stumbled upon.

    Argumentum ad populum in a nutshell, and I think nodes disappearing from a conversation would be a worse experience than not seeing them. If we don't have ability to do it for our own posts, the mob shouldn't either.

    So, I think that, submitting your opinion to the internet for validation is pretty stupid, but yet, the human desire to express online seems pretty evident. Mistakes should be made on the side of toleration.

      This wasn't supposed to be about opinions and viewpoints. But I think this notion of "sufficiently bad as to cause potentially intolerable damage to the site" extends not only to technical "answers" but to opinions and viewpoints as well.

      Please keep in mind that this "crap shroud" (or whatever we want to call it) only affects the appearance of the site to anonymous monks. So "minority viewpoints" will always be visible to the logged-in; and will of course be visible even to AM until the node rep hits some abysmal threshold.

      I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.
Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by Veltro (Hermit) on Jul 26, 2018 at 19:32 UTC

    I want to vote against this. If I make a post stating my opinion about something that the whole world disagrees with, then I also want the whole world to see it.

    Let's say I would be a vegetarian and would say 'Don't kill those poor animals' on a foodie forum with mostly meat eating son's of a bitches that are all going to vote me down for calling them that. So what would the outside world see when my opinion gets brushed away? That's right, to the outside world it will look like the forum is only for people who eat meat.

    PS: I'm not a vegetarian

      I understand your point, but we are all guests here. And it's the duty of the hosts to keep the house clean, at least from the outside.

      If others want to read "disputed" sub-trees, they can simply log in.

      If you want your opinion to be legible to the world, buy web-space (or endure the side costs of so called social networks)

      NB: We always had REAPED nodes (AFAIR) and it didn't hinder you collaborating here. This new approach is just a much weaker, but more flexible version of it. And nobody said it's perfect and can't be improved in the future ...

      Cheers Rolf
      (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
      Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

Re: RFC: Hide Very Bad Answers From Visitors
by anonymized user 468275 (Curate) on Aug 01, 2018 at 09:47 UTC
    A down-vote is not a vote to censor. Or as one biographer wrote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Indeed, it could be said that votes on one thing being counted as votes for something more drastic is what makes the Brexit democratically unsafe. Could always have a separate voting button (up, down, censor).

    One world, one people

      Except this isn't about censorship. It's about saying "this node is sufficiently $#!tty that innocent passers-by shouldn't be subjected to it".

        It's more innocent to be anonymous? I suppose that might be true in an increasingly repressive world, which I perhaps have to concur is the case.

        One world, one people

      I never use down-votes for simple disagreement, that's where I use non-votes.

      IMHO down-votes are meant for inappropriate content or behavior.

      It's the equivalent of throwing eggs, not the opposite of applauding.

      For me this patch is just a variant of the "reap"-consideration, which always existed (IIRC) and isn't censoring either because you can always log in and read the original posting.

      Cheers Rolf
      (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
      Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

        For me this patch is just a variant of the "reap"-consideration

        This is exactly why I'm very ambivalent about this change.

        We already have a process in place for removing nodes from the public eye, and this adds a second way that bypasses the established process.

        Thats quite a unique attitude not shared by most voters for the last 2 decades
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