[quote=Rich Toscano]
Again I don’t understand what for-profit or mainstream media has to do with this subject. Piggington is a free discussion forum, it’s just a whole different kettle of fish.[/quote]
Newsprint’s success (financial) these days is oriented around popularity, not critical content. Good critical content can be very unpopular. If your publication is not ‘popular’, you don’t get advertising revenue…
When someone’s content is rated on popularity, we risk going down the same route the results in quick sound-bites without much thought put into it. As someone else has stated, one can just filter a particular person out if they tend to produce more noise than signal.
However – these are just my opinions – can’t tell you what you must do with your website. I hope you read the full referenced posting though. I have many more on the risk that rating to popularity has on informed discussion.
I’ve seen blog sites degrade into the comment quality that yahoo has when ‘popularity’ upvote/downvote is added. Commenters spend less time on thinking about it and vote on ‘like’. Postings tend to get shorter and more inflammatory and less ‘thinking’ time is used before posting.
Right now, one needs to think things through or one will just get their arguments ‘ripped apart’. With upvote/downvote, one can write something really stupid but won’t get their position ripped apart. Just a lot of downvotes, which some people seem to like to get (any number of votes shows attention over posting something and getting zero votes either way)
[quote=Rich Toscano]My personal view is that there is a wide range in quality of postings here, and I would love to have a way to sort based on how high quality the community as a whole thinks postings are.[/quote]
You are assuming that the votes will be based uniformly on quality vs popularity. I think that is part of the mistake.
