BCSS Website - have your say

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purzo
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Re: BCSS Website - have your say

Post by purzo »

Bill wrote:Well I have to say I belong to 2 forums with thanks for the post buttons and 1 with a post rating button and and only one has a clique and that has nothing to do with the thanks/rating. All three are very active forums and have plenty of new posters and very little moderation issues apart from posts in the wrong place.
Like Bill I am also a member of another plant growing forum which has a like button. I have never seen the button being used in any negative way and would seriously doubt that the members of this forum, being extremely polite individuals on the whole, would use it as a weapon against moderators or anybody else. On the other forum typically a post/photo might get a handful of likes, never anything approaching 50. There is also a feature in the personal profile area which tells you when you have "won" the day by having the most liked post. The last time I won was with a post gaining 2 likes. To put it into perspective I would say that forum is also far more active than this one and has, if I might say, a younger demographic who might be more inclined to hot-headedness than us older folk. That isn't to say there aren't any disagreements because there definitely are on occasion, it's just that nobody uses the Like button in such cases, I'd guess that would be far too subtle. Besides, aren't personal criticisms the sort of thing the moderator is supposed moderate.

I think Keith and Ragamala have summed it up nicely and the Like button is a quick and easy way to give approval to a post/photo without any unnecessary verbal clutter. I'm all for it.
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JaneO
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Re: BCSS Website - have your say

Post by JaneO »

Now if there was a like button, I would "like" what Gary has just said,and concur with Ragamala and Keith!
IanW
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Re: BCSS Website - have your say

Post by IanW »

Sure Jane, and that really proves the point - before you know it there's convergence around a single view, and anyone with an opposing view rapidly gets fed up with the group think and leaves the forum. It seems great for people in the cliques, but pushes away new people with new ideas which is typically the silent majority. This forum needs more people, not less.

The problem is that this is a hobby that's highly dependence on scientific ideas, and those ideas don't thrive in group think environments - if someone posts an ID thread and someone mis-identifies the plant, but gets 50 likes because they previously have a good track record and are part of a clique, but someone else correctly identifies it and only gets 5 likes because they're a complete newcomer to the forum then who is the person getting the id going to believe? The fact is likes act not just as a simple thanks, but as a form of persuasion in situations like this - the person who got the ID right might never come back to the forum.

The fact someone said one forum even treated like a game and that you could somehow "win" on the forum is a prime example of the problem - it means people start posting based on some kind of popularity contest, rather than on usefulness. Anything that discourages posting of free ideas, and encourages posting of group think, especially on a forum like this where we often need to deal with new ideas surrounding the science of our plants, is really a terrible idea. Consider Derek's recent thread on inbreeding, it was a useful exchange where both sides learnt something, if one side was liked like hell and the other not, the other side would just give up with the perception of wasting their time, the discussion would be cut short, and there'd be less progression of combined society knowledge as a result.

Effectively unless you also have dislike you have a situation that it's not obvious that a view is controversial, in the above two examples it may be that there were actually a whole bunch of people who disagreed with the ID, but couldn't be bothered posting (just as people couldn't be bothered to agree, but were willing to do a drive by like), that might have told the new comer that actually although they got less likes, the other guy got more dislikes. Similarly in the second example, a post with 50 likes may also have 50 dislikes showing it's controversial nature and giving a better idea of what the actual view of the post is rather than a misguided belief that there's nothing but support for the idea, even if the idea is demonstrably wrong.

But I think dislike buttons just exacerbate the problem overall, when it's easier to just not have the problem at all. I've yet to see any threads so full of thanks as to be annoying or useless, but if that is the purpose, then maybe that's at least a half way step - make it a thank you button, rather than a like button. You'll still have many of these problems, but it might dampen the issue at least a little bit.

The idea that like buttons would only ever be used as intended shows an incredible naivety towards the reality of human nature on the internet. So it's really a question of what the intention of it is - is it to reduce the inflow of new ideas, create a harmonious group think culture of only a handful of people that lasts until it doesn't? Or is it to improve the quality of forum discussion? If it's the latter, then a like button will do the opposite. If it's the former, then great, it'll work wonderfully until it doesn't, which may take years, but why even create a chance for that to happen in the first place when it's entirely avoidable and unnecessary and damages the quality of discussion in the meantime?
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Bill
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Re: BCSS Website - have your say

Post by Bill »

In your opinion/ experience maybe, my personal experience is vastly different and so it is something that I am happy to explore and aslo will quickly turn off if proven wrong.

Bill
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Re: BCSS Website - have your say

Post by AntonyC »

I'm with Bill on this. Why not give it a try?If it doesn't work or gets abused you can pull the plug. It may well encourage people to partake a little more. The only way to move the forum forward is to try new things. Not everything will be a success but you don't know till you try ......
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IanW
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Re: BCSS Website - have your say

Post by IanW »

Bill wrote:In your opinion/ experience maybe, my personal experience is vastly different and so it is something that I am happy to explore and aslo will quickly turn off if proven wrong.
No, not just my opinion/experience, our behavioural analytics team have done work on this (and some other features) for our marketing team. Sadly, I can't provide raw data because it's commercial in nature (i.e. paid for by a client) but in summary out of our case studies, there were a number of sites that introduce it along with other features and didn't see a decline (because the other features overshadowed any decline), but of the sites that introduced it into discussion forums in isolation with a decreasing ad revenue base (user base) the decline sped up within 3 - 6 months. The sample size wasn't large (8) but the result was a clear negative correlation across all of them which doesn't paint a good picture.

Where it did offer growth was on non-responsive content, such as news stories (not forums), but that was in conjunction with Facebook, such that the content also got shared.

Other functionality included addition of things like emojis (no change in rate of decline), social support for sharing content (positive change, slowing and in one case reversing decline).

So sure, it's not my mistake to make and you can indeed trial it, but by the time you turn it off you may already have lost users which is why the contra-position makes sense, leave it off, and enable it if the userbase isn't growing - but I think the comments here so far already highlight precisely the problem, JaneO's automatic response was to inadvertently admit that her first instinct would be to use it to reinforce her own personal views, and that's the instinct of the vast majority of people, so again, to say it wont happen is utterly naive - the problem is there already, even before it's implemented.

But hey, I've been "out-liked" already on this one, so go for it. I had hoped one of the benefits of maximising community growth however might be that we'd then have more volunteers who in turn might be convertible into content creators so that for example makleodss' earlier suggestion of having a kind of Wiki to act as a database of knowledge on the different species, along with a decent library of pictures of each, all entirely linkable within the forum to assist in providing direct references to information about plants in say ID threads might become a reality, but that can only be so if there are sufficient users to populate the content. I think it'd be a lost opportunity if we failed to do something ambitious as that, instead settling for things as trivial and ultimately pointless as like buttons in the forums.

I think this is symptomatic of Phil's earlier concern about whether now this is happening we're simply not going to be ambitious enough.
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Bill
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Re: BCSS Website - have your say

Post by Bill »

We can only be as ambitious as there is support for what we do and I am not just talking "yes I would like to see that" but "yes I can and will help to do that". Sadly there is little enough of the former and none of the later.

Bill
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JaneO
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Re: BCSS Website - have your say

Post by JaneO »

The one thing IanW is missing. Under normal circumstances I would not have passed comment on the forum. I made a comment in this instance as ideas are being discussed. A "like" button removes clutter as Keith said. There would have been no need for me to waste time repeating something I already agreed with. I could have pressed a button to achieve same. Some spend hours writing essays on the forum! A lot us don't have the time or inclination! A like button would not deter those! A like button encourages people to respond to ideas without need for additional comment. Without one, people often don't get involved at all. It can prove positive.
Al Laius
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Re: BCSS Website - have your say

Post by Al Laius »

JaneO wrote: A like button encourages people to respond to ideas without need for additional comment. Without one, people often don't get involved at all. It can prove positive.
A like button would only encourage people to respond if they liked it, therefore there should be a 'dislike' button too, surely.

Al
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Peter
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Re: BCSS Website - have your say

Post by Peter »

And that's where it gets contentious Al. I'm with IanW on this.
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