Baron's Tight-wire Act

[bone]

I have been following the BMT dust-up with AMP with passive curiosity, and it strikes me that to successfully moderate a forum requires a tremendously level head and even temperament. Quite the balancing act.

If ET's posting policies, censuring and editing are too heavy- handed on individual members, the quality and quantity of worthwhile and relevant posted materials will suffer accordingly. Likewise, vendors are required to finance the operation of a large forum - and in turn it is only fair that they should be allowed the courtesy of responding to critiques they feel are void of fact or are unjustified trolling.

Members that post relevant, interesting, trading-related materials frequently get drowned out by the more snarky and demeaning Members. Seems to dilute the quality of the forum and I must admit I would love to see more hardcore technical trading discussion.

Just some thoughts.

 

[Baron]

Tight-wire act is a very accurate description. I do my best to maintain the best balance possible between satisfying the Members, Moderators and Sponsors but admittedly that balance isn't always where I want it to be and those times are very challenging on one's ability to stay rational. But the good news is that after 16 years of doing this, I still enjoy my job very much and look forward to improving ET in new and exciting ways that will increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

 

[bone]

improving ET in new and exciting ways that will increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

Anything you can do in terms of weeding out the nastiness and buffoonery, and promoting serious hardcore topical trading discussion would greatly improve the ET experience. There truly needs to be a serious content shift.

 

[ronblack]

Bone, interest in technical trading discussions will reemerge after the stock market crashes.

 

[bone]

Somehow there has be a way for serious professional traders to post and exchange serious trading discussion without getting drowned out in short order. I like Baron's analogy of signal-to-noise ratios.

 

[Maverick74]

Baron, I have a suggestion. I think this feature could help in many different ways. Allow users to rate individual posts. Say on a scale of 1 to 5. Then using that rating, each poster will have an avg poster rating based on their posting. Users will be incentivized to add value in their posts. Then readers can have the option of joining a thread and selecting a filter option which would allow them say to only see posts from posters with a 3.0 rating or higher. They could select any level they want. Maybe they don't care. But for others, this feature could come in really handy. Say you have a long thread with 500 pages, by selecting only the highest rated users, one could get all the valuable posts pretty quickly. It will also allow people to essentially ignore the crap without having to use the ignore feature constantly. The ET community will essentially be setting the market for quality. Users won't have to use to this feature of course so it's not like you are forcing this on anyone. But I think it would improve civility and quality as most users I do believe would become self conscious of their user rating and try to improve it by adding higher quality posts.

 

[bone]

Baron, I have a suggestion. I think this feature could help in many different ways. Allow users to rate individual posts. Say on a scale of 1 to 5. Then using that rating, each poster will have an avg poster rating based on their posting. Users will be incentivized to add value in their posts. Then readers can have the option of joining a thread and selecting a filter option which would allow them say to only see posts from posters with a 3.0 rating or higher. They could select any level they want. Maybe they don't care. But for others, this feature could come in really handy. Say you have a long thread with 500 pages, by selecting only the highest rated users, one could get all the valuable posts pretty quickly. It will also allow people to essentially ignore the crap without having to use the ignore feature constantly. The ET community will essentially be setting the market for quality. Users won't have to use to this feature of course so it's not like you are forcing this on anyone. But I think it would improve civility and quality as most users I do believe would become self conscious of their user rating and try to improve it by adding higher quality posts.

What an excellent suggestion, and a great place to start !

 

[FXforex]

Baron, I have a suggestion. I think this feature could help in many different ways. Allow users to rate individual posts. Say on a scale of 1 to 5. Then using that rating, each poster will have an avg poster rating based on their posting. Users will be incentivized to add value in their posts. Then readers can have the option of joining a thread and selecting a filter option which would allow them say to only see posts from posters with a 3.0 rating or higher. They could select any level they want. Maybe they don't care. But for others, this feature could come in really handy. Say you have a long thread with 500 pages, by selecting only the highest rated users, one could get all the valuable posts pretty quickly. It will also allow people to essentially ignore the crap without having to use the ignore feature constantly. The ET community will essentially be setting the market for quality. Users won't have to use to this feature of course so it's not like you are forcing this on anyone. But I think it would improve civility and quality as most users I do believe would become self conscious of their user rating and try to improve it by adding higher quality posts.

The Trolls would love that feature. IMO the 5 star rating feature is useless because the trolls can give 1 star to the ET members they hate and 5 stars to the ET members they like regardless of the content of the post.


When scrolling through a long thread it's easy to ignore the posts that don't interest you.

 

[dbphoenix]

The Trolls would love that feature. IMO the 5 star rating feature is useless because the trolls can give 1 star to the ET members they hate and 5 stars to the ET members they like regardless of the content of the post.


When scrolling through a long thread it's easy to ignore the posts that don't interest you.

Or a simple "Thanks" button could be provided with a running total under his name of the number of Thanks the poster has received, and possibly the ratio of Thanks he's received to the total number of posts he's made (so that even relatively new members can earn a high ratio). I think TMF does the latter. Or used to.

There can also be a list of Most-Thanked posters so that those posters can be sought out rather than waiting to find them by chance. And/or a list of Most-Thanked posts.

The FB "Like" thing is also used but is mostly a popularity contest.

 

[Maverick74]

The Trolls would love that feature. IMO the 5 star rating feature is useless because the trolls can give 1 star to the ET members they hate and 5 stars to the ET members they like regardless of the content of the post.


When scrolling through a long thread it's easy to ignore the posts that don't interest you.

That's easy to fix. Amazon already wrote an algo for that and I think Baron had a similar one. Sites like AMZN and IMDB on moving ratings would discount people who always voted 1 or 5. It also discounted people who always voted the same i.e people only only voted movies a one star. The algo also gave preference to people who had seniority. And finally, you could use the algo to weight those who actually have high ratings themselves. So posters who are judged to be of high quality would be relied on to vote for others. All it is a mathematical coefficient. It's very easy to do. So you voting one stars for people you hate would not even affect the rating.