New rating scheme at K5

Those who are interested in these kinds of things may want to read about
Kuro5hin.org's new rating scheme for comments:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/6/172738/261

What I find funny is that once you have goal-oriented discussions rather
than mere exchanges of opinion, rating systems become mostly useless
and, in fact, potentially harmful. I would not want to rate comments on
Wikipedia because my interest is to work with people, not to grade them.
On discussion sites like K5, threads are essentially contests, and the
ratings express that -- the comment with the highscore "wins".

Regardless of that, K5's rating system has worked rather well in the
past to bring out the comments in a long discussion that are truly worth
reading, even if they do not represent your own point of view. And if
you want, you can consider K5 a school in both logic and rhetoric (some
pupils may only exercise one of the two and still get good grades,
though).

The new scheme compresses the scale (something which I'm not
particularly fond of) and requires a minimum number of ratings before
they are shown (something which I have lobbied for repeatedly). All
users are now allowed to moderate comments as "-1" to hide them from
anonymous users or those who have chosen in their user preference not to
see them (previously, only "trusted" users, who had received many
favorable ratings in the recent past, were allowed to hide comments).

Rusty (K5 founder) should be commended for not falling into what I would
call the Slashdot trap -- devising ever more complex schemes to combat
abuses from users. Instead, he has made the scheme simpler in areas
where he felt it didn't work well. Let's see how it goes.

Regards,


Erik


-- 
Scientific Reviewer, Freelancer, Humanist -- Berlin / Germany
Phone: +49 (0)30 45491008 -- Web: http://www.humanist.de/erik
Editor of: http://www.violence.de, http://www.infoanarchy.org
    Save the Public Domain: http://action.infoanarchy.org

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, 
one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
  --Edmund Burke, 'Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents'


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