This seems like a good idea. With a “throttle message” that links to suggestions/reminders for how people can reply to multiple people in a single reply.
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In my view it works as intended. I’d also keep it as manual invocation for mods and TL4 Leaders, which does the job (at least with this community).
If you do implement programatic invocation, one thing you might want to consider is replacing the Topic Lock that kicks in over a certain flag threshold with Topic Throttling instead. The four-hour Lock can be a bit frustrating for users who want to make good-faith comments in an effort to steer things back On-Topic into Appropriate territory.
It could be useful, but when I get … errr… over-involved in a topic like that I find that existing cue/nudge message works really well toward getting me to take a break and let others have their say.
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I miss threaded discussions. It seems that many of the directives-- “consider replying to many posts at once!”, “you’ve replied to this person more than n times” seem to intersect with throttling schemes in a somewhat unpleasant manner.
As for the 5 day timer, I’ve noticed that it often takes time for the world to catch up, and if someone from the outside brings up an interesting perspective six or seven days hence-- well I guess that’s too bad.
Remember that Wollenscroft statue? unveiled on 10 Nov and yet people were still writing about it in magazines into december.
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Conveniently, new topics are free, and any member of the community can open a new topic linked to the old, or a post on the old, as needed, and those community topics stay open for 30 days from the last post.
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It’s also de-incentivized by the like system. I do use multi-quotes at times, but if you want any likes (frivolous as that is, I admit that I do) then it’s best to avoid multi-quote posts because (I think) people don’t want to click like for just part of a post, especially if there is something else in it they either don’t care about or maybe even don’t like.
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IIRC, the like system was intended to eliminate the need for
“THIS”, or worse still, animated pictures of people pointing upwards, coupled with a terse sentiment in white impact font.
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As y’all have surely noticed, I tend to post mostly (slightly) humorous one-liners, or less frequently, actual thoughts actually expounded upon. The latter are even less frequent than they otherwise would be, because the greater the ‘depth’ of the topic, the higher the likelihood that I will keep my mouth shut until I’ve taken some time to properly think about it, organize my thoughts, and then discover that I took too long in doing so.
I feel that for me, with my oh-so-fun blend of low self esteem and impostor syndrome (even on subjects I am well-versed or even an expert in), that leaves me feeling that either my ‘contribution’, or my effort to learn more from the knowledgeable folk here, isn’t of sufficient value to create a whole ’nother thread about. And that if I did, who would even bother with it, as the subject was just fully dealt with last week. Perhaps I’ll try to push past that next time it happens.
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And like you said, 1 hour isn’t the minimum. I personally have started with a shorter timeframe and when the user in question showed evidence that they were clockwatching enough to post the second they could, increased the time to get the message across.
Without knowing the history, someone might stumble across the 1 hour and think “how draconian” and not realize that it didn’t start that way, and one or two posters forced an escalation.
Given that the alternative is to close a thread entirely until the mods show up, and that they would really, really rather we didn’t do that, or throw so many flags that the system autocloses it (which some folks weaponize to stifle discussion), I think slowing – even at the hour rate – is a decent compromise versus not being able to have a discussion, period.
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This seems good to me in some form. I’m not a combative poster but the posts I regret are ones made in the heat of the moment.
I’ve noticed that if I pause just enough to get a drink or go to the bathroom before hitting send, I always come back and realize the post would not have had a positive effect and I cancel it.
Locking threads has always bothered me since in the hot topic threads one side of the argument often want to stop all discussion more than they want to make their unpopular point.
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I get that (and I did not know that before), but the throttling function as it exists throttles everyone. If there were a way to throttle just the users escalating things, then the rest of us could go about our business. It would allow us to stop bad actors without taking away freedom from others, and also without having to resort to the more draconian punishment of banning those users outright (which can be, but isn’t always, justified in cases where throttling is invoked).
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What you’re describing couldn’t really be automated and couldn’t be a TL4 functionality. That means choosing which users are throttled would fall to the moderators, who more than likely would have already been alerted by flags (if the topic wasn’t already auto-locked). It doesn’t seem to be worth it.
As I said above, I’d prefer too many flags in a Topic to trigger a throttle rather than a four-hr lock, but I’m sure there are also good reasons for keeping things as-is.
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If it’s beyond the capabilities of the system, then I suppose it can’t really be helped. It would be nice to have for cases where people are just posting too much, too quickly, without doing anything flaggable in and of itself.
I genuinely believe that throttling and flagging should be used for different things, with flags for abuse/off-topic/bullshit and throttling just to slow things down, but I guess we are limited by what the system can do and the resources of the mods in terms of time. @MalevolentPixy I am thinking of situations that don’t rise to the level of banning, but still require some sort of action.
In the end, I still would error on the side of more freedom for users, and so (like @gracchus), I do not like the four-hour lock, but I also would rather see the throttling time set to 15 (or so) minutes as a reasonable stopgag until mods can get involved.
Edit: All of this said, I totally trust in the mods; they are all doing a great job.
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15 minutes is too short, at least for BB’s mod. Four hours is what works best for him.
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Sorry, I meant the throttling time in terms of how long between posts from a single user, not how long throttling or topic lock stays in effect.
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I just don’t think throttling a single user programmatically, either in a single topic or across the whole BBS, is workable or necessary. Throttling a topic programmatically presents problems, too, unless it replaces automatic locking.
Either way, the mod is given adequate time to investigate and take action (e.g. cleaning up, splitting, banning users) without the topic spiralling out of control.
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I suppose you’re right. In the end, throttling is only used in extreme cases to begin with and these are always ultimately and decisively handled by the mods, so it’s a small inconvenience for the rest of us to have to wait until our next post. I was just spitballing ideas.
Throttling is a good feature to have and it is much better than locking up a topic entirely, as you said.
Edit: Also, as you said, I would much prefer automatic throttling to automatic locking. If either of those is going to kick in automatically, it should be throttling.
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If the threshold is set well, the former should go a long way to preventing the latter.
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Not that hacker news is a model (it’s not, don’t worry), but they have one hidden feature that I find kind of interesting, and might be worth discussing in depth. I noticed it myself when participating:
After you reply more than 2 times, the software adds a progressive delay before each subsequent reply. So the reply box takes a little longer to appear for that 3rd reply, even longer for the 4th reply, longer still for the 5th reply, and so on. I’m not sure if it’s a geometric squared kind of backoff, but it might be! The idea is to pump the brakes and discourage rapid fire back-and-forth, as if you were in an unmetered chat room with the other person.
I thought it was clever, and indeed… I was engaging in a very XKCD 386 way with another person at the time, so I appreciated the gentle nudge to slow things down. It didn’t tell me I was doing anything wrong or nag me in any way; the reply entry box just wasn’t there for me until I came back a bit later.
Now, this feature may be scoped to a person, as in replying to the same person many times, or it could be scoped to the topic. I’m not sure. But I certainly don’t wanna fall into the trap of 386’in it too often out there… and I want just-in-time reminders to aspire to be a better version of myself.
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Is this something that you’re thinking of trying out?
I think there is one other issue worth looking at, one that might be a bit harder to address. Often, somebody will say something stupid, and within minutes, ten people will respond to that post, telling that person why what they said was stupid. Several of these replies will inevitably say pretty much the same thing. If the person who said something stupid in the first place decides to double down and reply to everyone, then you’ve got dozens of posts revolving around the stupid thing that was said, rather than the actual topic. In the end, all of these posts get eaten when the mods clean up, making it much ado about nothing.
I would not want to restrict members from calling out stupidity whenever it arises, but it might be nice to have a system message that says, “This post already has X responses. Is it possible your point has already been made?”
Just my 2 cents on something I see quite often.
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