EPTOn December 11 2007 06:50 Chill wrote:
Edit: I actually think the MBS thread model is ideal. It starts with a group of people talking about a subject. Slowly, people lose interest as the thread grows, and now there is a core group talking amongst themselves. The barrier to enter that thread gets higher, so someone wanting to bring up a new topic can either a) not post it, or b) glance over the background in the thread and then post. The current system allows option c) ignore all previous content and post your thread. I suppose that's fine, but I do think there are consequences of operating like that. Do the positives outweight the negatives? I don't know. As I said before, I simply ignore all these philosophical debate threads.
Edit: I actually think the MBS thread model is ideal. It starts with a group of people talking about a subject. Slowly, people lose interest as the thread grows, and now there is a core group talking amongst themselves. The barrier to enter that thread gets higher, so someone wanting to bring up a new topic can either a) not post it, or b) glance over the background in the thread and then post. The current system allows option c) ignore all previous content and post your thread. I suppose that's fine, but I do think there are consequences of operating like that. Do the positives outweight the negatives? I don't know. As I said before, I simply ignore all these philosophical debate threads.
Ideal for a research think tank, maybe. But at TL we have threads about 5 favorite bands, clown walkers, current events, etc. Maybe to a reader two topics on the same thing might seem repetitive. But why not let those different people have those discussions? The point is to let people meet eachother and talk, not create ultimate truth in document form on every possible topic. It's a community, not a job. While I think it's important for people to contribute to a thread in the way expected or get out, I think TLnet should have enough room for them to not only get out of that thread, but to go make their own one if they like, at least as a blog post, and let the different types of threads compete. Say you want to make a topic to get to the bottom of the moral questions of Vick's case. Someone else might have a completely different take and not want to spend hours fighting yours. Why not let him? Does that really harm the site as a community-builder?
I think what happens more of the time is an option d): ignore some of the content in the current thread, but post your comments to it. In fact the majority of all participation on this site follows this formula out of necessity. It would be better if we demanded people admit what they actually read, and to start a sub-thread if they did not want to read it all. But if you want to try to have it both ways, I think we get neither. Instead we get people pretending to have read more than they did.
So the question is, what is better for TLnet? One topic per issue, or many? In the SC2 forum we have adopted a radical, strict, 1-topic-per-issue (for the purposes of this topic we could call it "singularity", adj.).
I agree that forcing an issue into one topic, while requiring everyone to read every thread before responding, offers an interesting mechanism where the cost to get involved increases as it goes along, I do not believe this works for all topics because the cost ultimately gets too high for anyone. A discussion has to be constantly split, and reframed, and sometimes having two different options for a discussion alongside eachother is the only way to do this.
My preference is that two completely seperate groups of people, maybe months or years apart, can be allowed to have virtually the same discussion on the forum, and there's no harm in it, but in fact it actually helps because it attracts these people and others, creating attractive things for people to do on this site. In other words, we don't need to shut threads down because it's "been done before." People who've seen it before can ignore it, and if there is really no interest it should die on its own.
Now, if someone starts a topic and no one has any interest in it, then that's a bad topic and the person who started it should be discouraged. But if you have tons of people who want to talk about something "old," what I think is best for everyone is that we let them do it.
The SC2 forum is set up differently because it has specific goals in mind: to say what we want for SC2, so Blizzard can hear it. So I don't disagree with that. But in other forums (General, Blogs) there is no such dire goal in mind, so I am not convinced of Chill's position (above).
