Psychologically speaking, punishment is the wrong way to go about shaping behavior. I could go into all of the negative side effects, but they are already apparent throughout the board, including retaliation, evasion, increase in negativity, etc.

It would be better if behavior was shaped through a system of rewards for positive behavior - could be sort of like Kur5hin's system, or something else like slashdot's karma.

Anyway, i know this is never going to be implemented, but I figured that for academic purposes, the only scientifically validated method of effectively shaping behavior should be proposed.

8/5/2003 10:34:40 AM

there are no useless ideas, only useless people.

8/5/2003 10:55:03 AM

there are no useless people, just people that need to die and havent yet

8/5/2003 11:16:07 AM

I don't know what you're talking about, but I guess I'll go along with it.

8/5/2003 12:02:17 PM

This would actually be kind of cool. Slashdot's system works fairly well at sifting out crap from good comments, but you can still read the crap if you choose. OTOH you also get "karma whores" that people bitch about all the time.

Also, all of Chit Chat would basically end up at -1 on the slashdot rating.

8/5/2003 8:36:09 PM

well alrighty then

anyone wanna break this down in english?

8/5/2003 9:30:48 PM

yes, we do not all speak geek

8/5/2003 10:03:06 PM

he wants to give treats to good little doggies instead of choke collaring the bad ones

8/5/2003 10:11:55 PM

basically that people learn better and more quickly through positive reinforcment (ie - rewards) rather that punishment. He's basically saying that instead of suspending people for doing dumb stuff, reward the people that don't do dumb stuff

8/5/2003 11:05:29 PM

I don't know how Kuro5hin's system works, but slashdot's is pretty simple. Visit slashdot.org and look at the comments after the stories to see how it works.

Basically, every registered user receives a certain number of moderation points to use. When you read a comment, you can either mod it up (give it a point) or mod it down (subtract a point). You can also mark it Informative, Funny, Troll, etc. from a preset list of options. When you're reading the comments that come after a story, you can select what level of comments you want to see. For example, if you select to only view comments that have a 5 (the highest level), you generally see the best posts; you could also select -1 (the lowest score) as the threshold and see everything that scored -1 or above.

The system remembers the moderation points associated with your posts; this is called "karma." If you consistently post things that get modded down, then your new posts have a lower default score (although users could still bring them up by giving them points). If you consistently post things that get modded up, then your new posts have a higher default score.

8/5/2003 11:36:58 PM

i'm well aware of the rewards over punishment idea, just because i dont speak psychology doesnt mean i'm a down baby

thank you dave for providing a real explanation

now lets get down to the bottom of this, whats so good about having karma points, how does that help you?

8/5/2003 11:54:56 PM

The reason karma helps you on slashdot is because it makes your posts visible.

By default, when you visit the site, you only see comments that are rated 1 or above (although you can change this setting). If you have bad karma and your posts are at -1, most people will never read them.

It takes away attention from trolls, which is the thing they want most.

8/6/2003 12:57:48 AM

so if you have a -1 post karma thingie, then what happens to your threads, can you just not make threads or are they automatically shuffled to the bottom?

[Edited on August 6, 2003 at 1:01 AM. Reason : ds]

8/6/2003 1:01:14 AM

You can post a new thread, but it's not visible to anyone with a threshold higher than your thread's score, so it's not visible. Go to slashdot.org, click on the "Read Comments" link underneath a story, and check it out yourself. You can select options for the threshold, the way you want to view comments, etc.

As to whether something like that would work here is debatable. First off, it would take a lot of work to implement (and what do you do about all the pre-existing threads?). Second, Tdub is set up differently--there's no subthreading. And of course the community is widely varied--unlike slashdot, which is a news source for the tech community, TWW's only purpose is to let some college kids post messages about anything.

I doubt this would've solved our current round of problems. If Chit Chat threads got posted in the Garage, the Garage people would mod them down, the chit-chat folks would mod them back up, everything would even out...but as the process was going on you'd still have a lot of crap to wade through.

Personally, I think the whole totalitarian thing has worked out pretty well on TWW. As long as you have a decent moderator things stay where they should be and you can find what you're looking for...

8/6/2003 1:21:18 AM

Ok, so maybe those who consistently post "worthwhile" posts will be able to post non-stop, but those who consistently post "crap" posts will only be able to post at the rate of 1/min...

8/6/2003 7:47:35 AM

i like this idea

but it prolly means i'm out of business

8/6/2003 11:00:46 AM