I’m trying to think of a simple icon which could appear by user-name in comments to indicate either “I have been an active member for <X weeks” or “I have posted <X comments”. My first thought was a cartoon of a newborn, but that seems a bit patronizing.
ETA: Ideally the icon would be the same height as the username itself, which doesn’t give us many pixels to play with.
Why not just when you click Vote Down, if they’re considered new, a little message appears that says ” is new to the site. Could you gently explain why you are disrecommending their comment to others?”
Lots of sites have this kind of thing—and the commonest implementation I see is “five whatevers” (eg five stars or five coffee beans or in our case five paperclips?) where they start out grey and progressively get coloured-in to indicate… not time-since joined but a combination of that and of active participation in the community (usually numbers of posts and replies).
We could easily compare time-joined to karma points. EY et al would get five paperclips, a newbie with no karma would start with none. The paperclips could work on a logarithmic scale.
Maybe some average karma-per-comment/post number, rather than an absolute karma number, would skew slightly less in favor of people who have high karma scores half for sheer volume?
Well, we’re trying to signal whether you should treat a particular commenter gently. If a particular commenter has posted 1000 comments, and none have been voted up, there’s no need for kid gloves.
I’ve seen a few forums where a user’s name is accompanied by a ‘rank’, often humorous, indicating standing in the community. I’m not sure whether this is generally based on number of posts or length of membership or some combination of the two but it might be apt here. I’m sure someone else can do a much better job of coming up with ranks than me but something along the lines of:
neophyte, aspiring rationalist, follower of the way, master rationalist, etc.
It’s a while afterward (and it does not seem that this idea caught on), but I think the obvious choice would be to use the EM spectrum. Describing Eliezer as a “gamma ray rationalist” seems quite fitting to me.
I think our tribe is small enough, and blatant mistakes made by commenters are rare enough, for senior members to be able to recognize the new members simply by memory, checking the commenting history on the user pages when in doubt.
and blatant mistakes made by commenters are rare enough
By ‘rare enough’ do you mean “only about 1 in 3 comments” or is my standard of “blatant mistake” stricter than yours? (I was under the impression that you were actually more fussy than I since you mentioned being wary of hitting your downvote cap despite being in the same karma ballpark as I.)
It’s not the senior members that I’d be worried about… but, say, myself. I have already made one mis-application so far—where I thought somebody was making a rookie mistake, but they actually had been around for a while and he was very upset at my correction.
I think we don’t have too much problem at either end of the scale, this sort of solution would help the mob in the middle.
Explaining downvotes for newcomers (as shown by join date) would economize on effort where the marginal payoff is high.
I’m trying to think of a simple icon which could appear by user-name in comments to indicate either “I have been an active member for <X weeks” or “I have posted <X comments”. My first thought was a cartoon of a newborn, but that seems a bit patronizing.
ETA: Ideally the icon would be the same height as the username itself, which doesn’t give us many pixels to play with.
Why not just when you click Vote Down, if they’re considered new, a little message appears that says ” is new to the site. Could you gently explain why you are disrecommending their comment to others?”
I like this
Lots of sites have this kind of thing—and the commonest implementation I see is “five whatevers” (eg five stars or five coffee beans or in our case five paperclips?) where they start out grey and progressively get coloured-in to indicate… not time-since joined but a combination of that and of active participation in the community (usually numbers of posts and replies).
We could easily compare time-joined to karma points. EY et al would get five paperclips, a newbie with no karma would start with none. The paperclips could work on a logarithmic scale.
At which point the natural desire to earn status within communities would drive many of us to maximize paperclips. Which would be funny.
Why not use what we’ve already got and use their karma score? Maybe show it when you mouse over the name or something?
Maybe some average karma-per-comment/post number, rather than an absolute karma number, would skew slightly less in favor of people who have high karma scores half for sheer volume?
Well, we’re trying to signal whether you should treat a particular commenter gently. If a particular commenter has posted 1000 comments, and none have been voted up, there’s no need for kid gloves.
I’ve seen a few forums where a user’s name is accompanied by a ‘rank’, often humorous, indicating standing in the community. I’m not sure whether this is generally based on number of posts or length of membership or some combination of the two but it might be apt here. I’m sure someone else can do a much better job of coming up with ranks than me but something along the lines of:
neophyte, aspiring rationalist, follower of the way, master rationalist, etc.
Or in keeping with the martial arts theme, a series of belt colors? I know this varies from art to art and dojo to dojo, though.
It’s a while afterward (and it does not seem that this idea caught on), but I think the obvious choice would be to use the EM spectrum. Describing Eliezer as a “gamma ray rationalist” seems quite fitting to me.
I think our tribe is small enough, and blatant mistakes made by commenters are rare enough, for senior members to be able to recognize the new members simply by memory, checking the commenting history on the user pages when in doubt.
But if the tribe expands?
We worry about any problems that brings when they happen. (Premature optimization is usually a bad idea.)
By ‘rare enough’ do you mean “only about 1 in 3 comments” or is my standard of “blatant mistake” stricter than yours? (I was under the impression that you were actually more fussy than I since you mentioned being wary of hitting your downvote cap despite being in the same karma ballpark as I.)
The problem with Nesov_2009 is that I’m prohibited from downvoting him by the site rules.
Hey! How did I end up here? Must have been a bump somewhere in the recent comments.
It’s not the senior members that I’d be worried about… but, say, myself. I have already made one mis-application so far—where I thought somebody was making a rookie mistake, but they actually had been around for a while and he was very upset at my correction.
I think we don’t have too much problem at either end of the scale, this sort of solution would help the mob in the middle.
Getting upset at being corrected sounds like a rookie mistake to me.