by Observer on Thu Feb 19, 2015 3:51 pm
About voting: allowing users to vote, like at Reddit, seems great in theory. One User, One vote. Democracy. Yay. But there is a big minus about this voting thing in reality. I'll explain the big minus in my final paragraph at the bottom of this post (feel free to skip down to that.)
In the Reddit style, the default setting is: theoretically, the up-voted posts appear at the top (due to being intelligent, well-written, surprising, or just plain humorous) and the down-voted posts appear at the bottom where most people don't scroll down to.
(Uh, well, actually, that default Reddit style still doesn't display in perfect "voted-ranking-order", because of the fact that people are allowed to simply tack on their comment directly under the top voted comment. Meaning, instead of replying to the thread itself, some users sneakily reply to the highest ranked comment, or to the comment directly under that. So even in this supposed "voted-ranking-order" style one still can not scroll down perfectly from highest ranked comment to lowest ranked comment. One ends up scrolling down from highest ranked, to some jerk who just posted some crap directly under the highest ranked comment, then comes the second ranked comment, then the third, then oops some other jerk replied to the third highest ranked comment, so in the end when you scroll from top to bottom you still see various low ranked comments popping up here and there even in the middle and even near the top.
Now, to solve that problem, of seeing all those crappy down-voted posts when you only want to see the cream of the cream, users can choose in their settings area, "Whenever I browse a thread, show me only the posts that have a positive score" or you can limit it even further by saying "Whenever I browse a thread, show me only the posts that have a positive score above 50 (or 100, or 300, or whatever)" Those settings are all up to each user to decide for himself or herself.
Another option, shown at the top of each thread, is sorting by chronological order. Meaning, "Nevermind ranking, show oldest to newest, or, newest to oldest", but again, just like explained above, because people are able to attach their comment to any comment, well, it turns out that even when you select the "sort chronologically" option you STILL don't get to see all of the comments sorted chronologically. You see a kinda' chronological pattern, but a lot of non-chronological posts attached under posts, so chronological lovers like me are disappointed.
Another option is "Show me the controversial posts at top, the posts which received about 50 up-votes and about 50 down-votes, so even though the total score has balanced out to about zero, I still would prefer to read the controversial comments first, before reading the non-controversial comments." But again, because of the "comment anywhere" ability mentioned above, you STILL don't really get the perfect sorting results.
And let's not forget the lemming effect. Where people, either consciously or unconsciously, start upvoting a post/thread just because the post/thread started to be upvoted by others. People walk in to the party, and since upvoting has already begun, your experience begins by seeing those popular posts/threads floating at the top, and so those are the posts/threads you are most likely to upvote yourself, because #1 all of these other users in this lovely community can't be wrong, and #2 who wants to sift through the down-voted losers at the bottom, there must be something wrong with them, so I'll just look at these top 20 posts and upvote a few within them. Hmmm, so whoever gets in there early and gets the ball rolling in one direction or another has a good chance of creating momentum towards an "early consensus" which then leads the lemming-like monkey-see monkey-do aspect of humanity to simply copy the early consensus which leads to a "strong consensus" that once strengthened becomes very hard for any of the non-copying relatively-independent-thinking voters to fix.
But here I want to end my complaints about the Reddit voting system with the biggest complaint, which is a very dangerous minus, in my opinion. The voting. The voting allows TPTB to use a combination of shills and bots to totally skewer the results. It's like Diebold voting software, brought to the online community. Democracy becomes a total illusion. Yep, voting bot technology exists and is being used. The bot tech is simple, "I'm a shill, I've been paid to downvote this kind of post, so now that I've marked this post with this special software as being a 'make this post disappear' kind of post, now all I have to do is click this one button and my thousands of usernames will log in, one by one, in an apparently random fashion, nothing obvious at all, just various username logging in reading articles and voting, right, and so my bots downvote to obscurity this truthful post/thread, and concurrently upvote to the top the fraudulent posts/or threads, to really make those truthful posts/threads disappear down to the depths where most people won't ever see. Goodbye truth. Hello mainstream bullshit and red herrings and time wasting posts. This creates a reality in which the highest voted threads and the highest voted comments within each thread, are NOT determined by the regular people doing the "one user, one vote" thing, to the contrary, the highest ranked stuff at Reddit turns out to be the stuff which TPTB want the masses to see, and the lowest ranked stuff (that most people thus never notice) turns out to be the stuff which TPTB don't want the masses to see. What's the solution to all of these shills and bots overpowering with mountains of upvotes and downvotes the actual will of the readers? Shall we enforce a new rule, "From now on let's limit one vote to one IP address. Yeah, that'll limit the bad guys from skewing the results with their hundreds of thousands of username robots. One IP address, one vote. Yeah!" Nope, because here is the second problem, TPTB, in addition to having the money for hundreds of shills each controlling thousands of usernames connected to bot technology, also have the resources to buy millions of IP addresses. So TPTB will always be stuffing the online ballot boxes, with extreme amounts of usernames and extreme amounts of IP addresses. Now, one might say, "Well here at Clues Forum, because we have wisely limited, and will continue to wisely limit, the number of users by requiring a good-sounding introduction letter, we won't have this problem." I think the painful answer is, "Nah, that extra step hasn't prevented a bunch of shill accounts to have been created here, there are probably many many many quiet non-posting members with usernames, perhaps even 30 or 40 or 50%, who got in just like everyone else with a a mere letter, and this collection of quiet waiters would love to suddenly have this voting ability to push truthful posts down and fraudulent posts up. And in addition to the bad users sitting and waiting, there will of course come more. So, I think in the end the voting thing will lead to people complaining (as people do in the "conspiracy" section of Reddit) and leaving (as they recently have done, myself included), because we rational observers have noticed that the voting system is being skewed by usernames controlled by bots which are controlled by shills. So, bottom line, I prefer the idea of continuing to entrust the pin-ing/sticky-ing, moving, and deleting, to our one benevolent dictator, our beloved leader (ha ha, don't worry I'm not being sarcastic) whom all of us real readers obviously trust already, Simon - and whomever Simon has decided has already proven themselves over the many many years (Hoi, Brian, Nonho, Matt, and whoever has proven themselves over the years to be trusted by these long-standing admins/mods.) It sure is weird that I'm suggesting continued benevolent dictatorship forever, but I have seen the voting fraud in physical elections, and I have seen the voting fraud in online Reddit, so I am scared that voting in general no longer works when the bad guys control voting fraud technology.
[I'm still trying to figure out how voting can ever work in general. On one hand, we know that humanity must re-install the system of PURE democracy, because electing leaders means a republic, which of course means dictators refusing to make laws which the people want, due to bribes and threats from TPTB. We should only be voting for LAWS in a pure democracy, like in the Golden days of Greece, except without that unfair "White Male Land-Owning Voters Only" clause, of course. But again, how can we ever have voting if TPTB have the modern technology and the resources to stuff the ballot boxes? It's bad enough that they stuff real voters' minds with fake images, thus causing people to vote the wrong way, but now these top resource controllers are stuffing the ballot boxes with fake votes (like what happened in Ireland recently, and everywhere really. Anyway, just my opinion, I think that voting, currently (without some genius new idea to connect one physical body with one physical vote) is flawed due to the current technology imbalance and resource imbalance.]
Readers here trust Simon. That's why we're here. We've been burnt by other communities, with their claims of real victims and real actors and real images, we have never been burnt by Simon. I like the vibe of this guy living in Italy, whom I have written to and spoken with. I don't know WHO in the hell is actually controlling the majority of the 1400 quiet usernames, nor WHO in the hell will actually be controlling the new usernames who will sneak in after voting begins. I guess the real bottom line is this, feel free to introduce voting, which will then determine ranking, if you trust all the users then perhaps the voting results will be fine. I'll just continue to read every post chronologically, and mentally vote in my own mind about each post and about each poster. Final sentence: I DO like Hoi's idea of Simon (and his trusted few) marking the "MOST OBVIOUS, LEAST DEBATABLE, INSTANCES OF MEDIA IMAGE FORGERIES", so that readers can have the option of seeing (and showing to their family and friends) a big long purified collection of the cream of the cream - and yet the SeptemberClues.info site is basically that already, it simply needs the more recent CluesForum.info cream to be selected, marked, and added to the SeptemberClues.info cream ... and I think that job should be done by Simon (and his already trusted crew.) :-)
*PS - Simon, for the "I trust Simon more than I trust any of these other members, electronic voting is dangerous, long live this benevolent dictatorship" speech above, you can kindly send the secret $10,000 payment check to my home address, which, as a supposedly paid shill of The U.N./Wescam/Kissinger trifecta, you undoubtedly "already know." ;-) Haha