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18 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
18 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Better vote-enabled forums"
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date: 2022-06-14T10:53:12-07:00
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description: 'Armchair speculation: how we can learn from Redit, Lemmy, "Hacker" "News", et al to build forums for discussion rather than validation and attention-seeking.'
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---
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Armchair speculation: how can we learn from Reddit, Lemmy, "Hacker" "News", et al?
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1. A vote should be part of a reply with at least <var>N</var> words. <var>N</var> could be increased by mods and admins. Instances could federate votes conditionally based on the length or activity of a comment. Word counts can be problematic; I don't know a better alternative (maybe clause-count?). Flagging doesn't need a minimum word count.
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2. Forums shouldn't host their own top-level posts and comments. Those should be links from authors' own websites with microformats (think [IndieWeb](https://indieweb.org/)). The forum should be Webmention-enabled.
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3. Larger communities should have ephemeral chatrooms ("ephemeral" in that public history has a retention limit if it exists at all) to incubate posts. Authors (yes, original authors) could share their work and collect feedback/improve it before it's "ready". They could then post with increased visibility.
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4. One reason to flag a top-level comment could be "didn't look at the post". I say "look at" instead of "read" because certain posts are huge essays that could take hours to read. Top level commenters should at least be expected to skim.
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These qualities will make a forum less active, since the quality of content will be higher and some validation and attention-seeking will be filtered out. Low activity means higher visibility for good content. Forums could "get of the ground" by starting invite-only, gradually enabling these rules one-by-one before opening to the public.
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(psst: I might be working on "a thing").
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