1) Each poster has a certain amount to contribute to NSG, based on what is in their head.
2) There exists an optimal volume of posts, required to express what is in their head.
- If a poster posts below their optimal volume, then not everything which is in their head enters into the forum as quality of idea.
- If a poster posts at their optimal volume, then everything which is in their head enters into the forum as quality of idea.
- If a poster posts above their optimal volume, they have already shared (or failed to share) everything which is in their head, and additional posting creates diminishing returns on quality of idea, both for them and for people reading them.
Test:
Throttle the rate at which users may post to NSG, and see if the quality of posts improves.
I can think of two ways to do this:
- Determine the average posts per day for an NSG user, and throttle them all so that they cannot post above that average
- Throttle them to 2 posts per issue resolved.
I expect that this would greatly improve the overall idea quality of posts. One who is short on ammunition has an incentive to take more careful, effective shots. Many threads in this forum go up to 300 pages. They are unreadable after 8 or so pages - one can neither reasonably hope to read through the back volume in order to be on the same page, nor expect to improve the quality of the thread if they post without reading. If throttled, users would tend to make only their best posts, instead of filling the board with meaningless tit-for-tat one-liners.
This would also balance the forum between people who spend too much time on it, which is actually a poor indicator of personal life management and so transitively of idea quality, and people who cease to engage with it when the diminishing returns of continued engagement drop below a certain value.
Edit: Responding to constructive input, the original proposal was revised on page four. This revision is provided here:
Kaczynskisatva wrote:
Well, here's a democratic proposal:
Allow OP to check a box for "live thread" when they make a thread. If they designate it as a live thread, that means that they consider the topic it addresses to be evolving in real time, and it should behave as all threads currently behave on NSG.
Or, conversely, create a box for "throttle" which an OP can select, to make whatever throttling mechanism is determined by data to optimize post quality, apply to their thread.
Or, split NSG into two subforums, one in which threads are throttled by the yet-to-be-determined optimal method, and the other, a continuation of the present NSG.
I think this is a great idea, because it would allow the new proposal to be A/B tested, generating feedback both in terms of what users prefer to use, and in terms of what quality of posting goes into each forum.
Edit 2: Responding creatively to unintentionally constructive input, this proposal has again been expanded on page four, which is provided here:
Kaczynskisatva wrote:The idea-to-text ratio is the problem, not the text volume. Even though a throttle would improve the average ratio, it would not stop average volumes of sub-average idea content.
The response to this observation would be to create new moderation rules for the proposed throttled sub-forum, in which "this post contains neither artistic merit nor an argument" would be the basis for moderation. However, this would require active moderation, not a mechanism, so this is a diverging proposal.
Whether or not this diverging proposal should be tested, instead of the proposal to test a throttled sub-forum or thread option, depends on the resources available to the staff. They may have more access to a coder, to write the code for a throttle, or more access to volunteers to moderation, to moderate a subforum with this new constraint. However, both tests should not be done at the same time. We already have a control group, which is NSG in its present state, and only need to test one model against it at a time.
