I was just reading a message board thread about nothing of import.
What struck me was how Pythonesque the whole thing seemed. Each post began by insulting a prior user, followed by adding the writer’s alternate viewpoint. Imagine this with an upper class British accent:
User 1: “The Proposition ‘A’ is true.”
User 2: “From the stunted logic of your post, your mother clearly must have smoked throughout your gestation. ‘A’ is certainly not true.”
User 1: “Eureka! I thought the dodo extinct, yet here is one posting on this very bulletin board. ‘A’ is quite self-evidently true, as any animal evolved beyond the invertebrate knows reflexively.
It’s as though everyone was following a ritual template: insult, then comment.
Clearly, urging users to avoid flame wars is of no use. That approach has failed for decades.
Is there another way? Perhaps try and go with the flow instead?
Here’s a design to steal (or at least a research project): In message boards, provide two input fields. The first is an optional insult field. The second is the body of the message, in which nothing insulting may be uttered.
Variants to try:
- Allow readers to collapse/hide the insult field for all postings, until they are turned back on again. If they don’t like that sort of thing they never have to be exposed to it.
- Allow readers to police the postings and indicate whether the no-insult-in-the-body rule is violated. A critical mass of readers reporting a violation automatically bounces a submission back to the sender for correction.
- Allow readers to rate the quality of the insult. Give positive points to most good humored or creative or funny insults, negative points to the droll or crass.
By acknowledging peoples’ need to vent and by giving it an explicit place, could we separate out the content? Someone please try and let us know.
Slashdot’s community rating scheme is a good precedent for filtering out garbage. They don’t separate out insults from comments as suggested here, but readers do get to rank each posting. Only the more highly ranked articles are visible by default.
This lets casual readers skim the cream-of-the-crop feedback. However with the hierarchical threading plus filtering, it gets rather messy, and some posts lose their contexts.