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Comments on Thursday 21 August 2003:
An interesting project from Microsoft; reducing newsgroups, and the posters thereon, to statistics, so as to make it possible for a reader to get at the good stuff and easily ignore (or not even encounter) the dross. Quite a sound theory put forward by their pet sociologist, rendered more sound-seeming by being presented as a conclusion reached from pure statistical observation rather than as a hypothesis confirmed that way. Not sure, of course, how true that presentation is.

Unfortunate that newsgroups are a dying breed, since they're vastly superior to mailing lists for doing mailing list things; unintrusive, only getting the messages that interest you, relatively easy to pre-filter users you don't want to hear from. Perhaps this ability to filter posts automatically into a semblance of likely value-order will resurrect the beast.

The thing I really like about this technology though (and even better if it could be applied to mailing lists somehow too; certainly seems feasible for individual servers), is that if people are being rated based on their behaviour, and they know they're being rated on their behaviour - especially if ratings are accessible to all - their behaviour will probably alter, in a delicious feedback loop.

No more people just asking questions of a group and never giving anything back, no more perpetual flame wars between a few people ruining an otherwise perfectly good mailing list - the 'good' side of a flame war will not want to argue because it would ruin their reputation rating, and the 'bad' side will end up getting rated down into invisibility as they keep on arguing with whoever is new to the group. It would also provide a positive 'score' for the helpful people to feel good about themselves with.

Or! It'll result in people whining about their privacy, because people always whine about their privacy even if it's just data being constructed from other, publicly available, data. [04:57]

Nameless
There used to be a chat community that did something quite similar. People could rate whether a post or a comment was good, bad or neither. The tally of points was used to adjust a pool of points the user had, which metered how often they could post.

Of course, some people (usually the ones getting the worst ratings) would whine about how awful it was that they were getting, essentially, blacklisted for doing things everyone else didn't like.

RavenBlack
That's why it's nicer to *sort* the postings, rather than block them. You can't very well argue "you're censoring me" if what you're saying is still getting posted; the simple response is "no, we're just ignoring you".

James
Ya know, folks the world over get blacklisted for doing things everyone else doesn't like all the time; I don't see why it should be different online...

Tom
Slashdot would seem to indicate that given a large enough population, rating comments doesn't work. What you need is magical flying elephants. The threat of being trampled by a magical flying elephant should keep things running smoothly. Especially if you leave it up to the elephants to decide which posters deserve a trampling.

Digi
Spam-filter technology could be used to filter posts that you're not interested in, or are annoyed by. The ratings system assumes that everyone has the same standards as far as 'crap' posts are concerned.

RavenBlack
Not if the rating system is not a rating system but simply a statistical system that analyses based on the posts you have previously shown interest in.

Digi
Aha, then yes; it's effectively the same thing.

Zloduska
You couldn't possibly be referring to the CoV mailing list in your post? Nah.

RavenBlack
As one amongst several.
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