More Sony Invasion of MS Scorpio Thread Cleanup *Spawn*

Amazingly enough that thread has Sony and PS4 Pro mentions all over the first couple pages. I suppose that foundation helped guide the discussion.

 

Donate to B3D to build a wall!*

*May or may not be circumvented by an fp16 ladder adder.

 

No. That just goes to show how few can actually follow instructions and self-moderate. It wasn't even a full week after that newly created thread was being derailed once again.

 

I think the dilemma forum posters have, is what is an acceptable number of posts before it's considered a derail.

It's tricky.

 

Negative One. Don't even think about it.

 

To weigh in, IMO it's inevitable with every new console thread and has always happened. When there's no news, there's still discussion which inherently relates the rumoured product to the rest of the market. People seem to want intrinsically to have a mammoth thread! Self-moderation and compartmentalising one's own discussion is definitely a problem, and unique to discussion forums.

Only way I can think to address it is through warnings and temp bans (though never a permaban) to help educate. That and/or the moderators just doing a clean-up as is appropriate, but the workload does just get too much with popular threads and topics like Scorpio. And I'll hold my hand up, I'm sure there's times I've responded to somewhat OT posts in threads because I'm just responding to someone without checking first if they're on topic. Maybe reporting posts as OT is the way to go?

Maybe there could be democratic moderating, where if enough people vote a post off topic, it is spawned off into a new thread? That's such an awesome idea I'm going suggest it to @Rys, (after patenting it).

 

In the past I've investigated systems whereby you can downvote a post or thread, and after a certain threshold some configurable action happens (lock thread, users posts go into the moderation queue, etc). While useful on the surface of it, I could never come up with a means to set it up so that it wouldn't be gamed.

Especially somewhere like the Console forums, where things can be heavily polarised. Last thing we need is gamification of thread brigading, really.

So the idea is nice, but the implementation would be difficult.

 

If the action is simply to spawn a thread, there are no casualties. And there's not much reason to game a discussion that way. I think the concept is different to rating users or posts as is typically the case. Where the option is simply one of 'Is this post off topic?' then when enough people decide 'yes it is' and it's spawned off, we have the community deciding for themselves the granularity of discussions. Technical aspects could be a bit tricky (new thread titles; do you move replies and replies to replies) but on the surface I think it worth considering independently from the traditional post voting uses such as limiting posters or post visibility.

 

I'd need to be convinced of the cost:benefit a bit more. Users can always report a post and ask for it to be split out if required, and that only needs one "vote" to action if the request is sensible. I'm more inclined to invite more moderators to the fray to enable us to do that more quickly, than invest in a new system that would likely still require moderator clean-up afterwards to adjust thread title, make sure all posts came with it.

 

Is GPU compute powered machine learning able to do that job for us? What are even doing at AMD?? I think the problem with the report post option is that it's a one-off post, that in isolation can be considered on-topic enough. A single post or three doesn't make a tangent, but after a while it can become a tangent. And a tangent in one reader's view may not be agreed with by a moderator. Ultimately it's not democratic regard granularity, and that can result in peculiarities like the mammoth threads in the GPU fora where we're trying to work out what our members want amidst mixed messages from different users - see this thread for disagreements for what constitutes on topic!

Perhaps don't automate the system, but do have an 'off topic' vote, and when there are enough points the mods are alerted to handle it?

 

Isn't that just Report with a different dress on? It's easy enough to add alongside the Report function if it would definitely help, and there's a big enough difference to warrant plumbing in.

 

A report happens when one person presses it. It registers as something that requires action, which we'd then have to ignore until enough people also report the same post. An 'off topic' button wouldn't start a report until enough people had pressed it, and could also be public so users could see when others were thinking a thread was being dragged OT. Colour code it to bring people's attention to the need to self-moderate. Only make it available to those who have been here several years so it's the long-term population who get to help shape the discussion structure.



In every day use, readers would start to yellows creeping into the thread and know that users are wanting to be tighter with topic. They might change at that point, start their own new thread to continue the discussion (we wish!), or carry on, at which point more people would start to feel the thread was going OT. They'd vote, a threshold would be reached, the button shows red to show it's OT (please stop replying until we've had a chance to spawn a new thread) and a mod report is filed saying a cleanup is required. Importantly users will have a visual clue to not reply to OT posts which otherwise is difficult to notice - requires a reading of the title and its subjective interpretation.

 

I'm up for giving something like that a try. I'll investigate options and see what I can do.

 

I think this thread should be moved to the Forum Discussion forum.

 

Make people commenting PlayStation in Xbox threads pay for the wall

 

IMO, downvoting on posts/threads won't lead to better self-moderation, it'll lead to brigading.

People won't downvote offtopic posts or the posts they don't consider to bring relevant facts to the discussion, they'll downvote the posts and/or users with a different opinion to theirs.
It'll cripple actual discussion and empower circlejerks.

 

If the system is abused that way, it can be dealt with, or dropped. However, it's pretty obvious when a valid counter-argument is being flagged as OT. I find it poignant that you use the word 'downvoting' which shows the connotations you're bringing to the concept. Downvoting leads to hidden posts and banned users. Flagging as OT just moves a portion of the content to another thread - the arguments and quotes move with them and the discussion remains.

 

My comment referred to downvoting, which was referenced above in other posts. I didn't comment on the "flag as offtopic" suggestion.

I commented on downvoting because of my experience with it on e.g. reddit. There are communities (i.e. circlejerks on a grander scale) who gather to use downvotes to control narratives and bring down dissenting opinions. There are even obscure "Digital-PR" companies that are hired to create hundreds of bot accounts to instantly downvote all posts that are menacing towards the entity that hired them (tech companies, political parties, etc.)..

I don't really think B3D would be the target of Digital-PR companies, but enabling the downvote process here (with the typical "post gets hidden/deleted after X downvotes" features) would simply lead to the most organized circlejerks to completely dominate the narrative and hinder discussion as much as possible.



As for the "flag as offtopic" suggestion, it seems to me that the damage that offtopic does to the forum is rather "seasonal". It's mostly specific to hardware reveals where people always tend to make comparisons with competition, which often deviates to competition between previous generations, etc. I agree it's a problem that should be dealt with during these times (graphics card releases, console announcements, etc.).
However, I have seen wonderful discussions here that started as offtopic, continued as offtopic, but no one cared and the discussion kept being great. Should we end those too?

Perhaps what I'm suggesting is that maybe some threads (especially the ones dedicated to hardware announcements) should have the "flag as offtopic" button, and others shouldn't..

 

Is it such a difficult thing to grasp that the discussions aren't ended?? And that the choice is given to the board to decide? If everyone's having a discussion and enjoying it and no-one cares that it's off-topic, it'll not be voted for a move and carry on. If people do feel it's off-topic, it'll be spawned off and carry on. It's literally no different to the mods managing discussions (because we still do the moving), but it gives users a better voice for helping manage drifting topics.

 

I'm sorry, I may be genuinely lost in translation here.
What discussions aren't ended and what do you mean by the board?

All I was trying to say is sometimes it's important to be strict about offtopic derailing, other times it's not.
I gather you seem confident that the community will successfully auto-moderate over this aspect by collectively selecting what offtopics to report or not. But such kind of selection is a grey area and grey areas lead to unnecessary drama. Therefore, I don't share that optimism, but I'm just a single user expressing an opinion and I can be wrong.