So when does an ignore user or downvotes system get implemented?

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with us talking about somebody else publicly like this in a thread they’re not part of and where they’re unable to defend themselves.

Perhaps this should be private, and that chance should be given (in a civilized way)

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Well you can easily filter the topic down to just posts by that user. To do this, click any avatar in the topic map at the top of the page:

https://cdn.discourse.org//cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/boingboing/original/1X/5d4ccff1786794c536d32f1d7a786320cdf2e808.png

Expand the topic map to see the complete “cast of characters” for a topic. Click multiple times to filter to multiple users. It’s easy. AND FUN, DAMN IT.

The proper way to do this is frame the discussion in terms of the general pattern of behavior, that could apply to anybody:

  • Do we want to implement a downvote feature? Categorically, absolutely, no we do not. (For the record we view downvotes as antithetical to our mission of civilized discourse, so it is never going to happen.)

  • Do we want warnings when someone posts excessively in a topic? In this case, one user posted 22% of all replies to the topic. That is a lot in my opinion, unless you’re the topic starter and need to address clarifications to the topic, etc. Personally I am a fan of this (as well as other contextual warnings, such as replying excessively to the same user, replying over and over in sequence, and so forth), because it’s just-in-time reminders not to go off the rails.

  • Do we want to implement an ignore user feature? I won’t say it’s never gonna happen, but I am not a fan. First because Ignore is extremely complex from a technical perspective, lots of ways to get it wrong. But the deeper problem is that ignore is treating the symptom, not the disease. If someone is having a bad day, or gets set off by a pet topic now and again, that’s fine, but if a dark cloud follows them around wherever they go – then other remedies are more appropriate. Context.

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Already exists – you could certainly do the following:

  1. select the flag icon at the bottom of the post

  2. select “notify moderators”

  3. enter “this user has replied an awful lot to this topic and it reads like griefing the topic to me”

  4. select “notify” at the bottom

Like so:

You could also mention if the user has a history on this particular topic, with URLs for examples, etc.

I love you, man.

I mean, you got better from this point onward, but you already had me here.

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I am blocked by a fellow neighborhood activist on Facebook. She has blocked many people. So now there are two conversations going on at any time on our “forum” on the same thread that some can see all of, and two other groups see some of from two different perspectives. This has actually lead to mis-understandings about concrete issues. It is almost invisible, though. What is going on. So, I say just scroll past stuff that annoys you. You wouldn’t ask for someone to be kicked out of a party because you thought they were over-bearing. You would just move away from them. Stop responding.

6 Likes

Sometimes I’ve wanted the ability to downvote the odd post, but I can imagine why it’d be a bad thing…

But ‘like’ is way over-broad IMO.

What I’d really like to see is a thumbs-up icon for ‘like’, and the current icon standing for ‘love’.

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This is super helpful, I can see how to look at posts only by certain users, couldn’t quite figure out how to make it do:
-reset to see all after having filtered (I just edited the url, but seems like you should be able to unfilter as well?)
-filter to exclude certain users rather filter to only see them?

I didn’t flag because I don’t think the posts fall under inappropriate or spam, and don’t think the mods need to be bothered with it, but was curious because having a mechanism to self modulate who you see or don’t see isn’t uncommon.

You can reset the filter using the bar that appears at the bottom of the topic when it is filtered. Click on the avatars in the topic map to add users to the filter. Click again on the avatars in the topic map to remove them from the filter.

LOL @ ‘monkeysphere’.

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I TOTALLY do not get credit for that term, that’s all Mr. Wong from Cracked (the same guy who wrote ‘John Dies at the End’ and ‘This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It’). It was a moment of hilarious, brilliant zen over there, and kind of mind blowing and scientifically useful too!

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Not really to be a thread intended to discuss them, but rather how the Discourse SW works. I probably could have left out the example, but I still think it is illustrative. I definitely don’t want to start a meta-thread about someone in particular.

And if I do I it’ll be appropriately titled :stuck_out_tongue:

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Once again - Very Helpful! Thanks!

Too bad it doesn’t indicate on the toolbar which users you are viewing, or allow you to neg and subtract a certain user from the conversation, which is the ignore function I think I am looking for.

So we must conclude that…

Speak for yourself please. Claiming the voice of the group is slightly more offensive to me than calling me a name.

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I believe there was a time when users were given time outs.

Maybe an escalating 20-minute/ 1-day / 1-week / banned schedule could work?

I don’t feel a need for dislikes. As noted, the few cases which really call for it can already be Flagged.

I do want “don’t show me posts by this person”, equivalent to killfiles in newsgroup readers. Even when not deliberate trolls, sometimes there are people whom I really don’t want to or shouldn’t hear from directly because I’m going to have trouble not flaming in response. Better for everyone if that temptation is removed. And of course, if it’s a true troll, everyone killfiles them and they wind up being ignored – which is the single best way to make a troll go away; it’s no fun for them unless they get a response.

2 Likes

Yes, provided everyone who ever sees that post has 100% discipline 100% of the time and nobody ever makes the mistake of replying to it.

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Well, this is why I brought up disemvowelling in the other meta. I don’t think Maple or Marilove or Millie are trolls, if those are the people we’re talking about. Are we? Never mind, doesn’t matter.

Personally I try to treat people at least as well as they treat me, and people tend to pick up on that pretty quick, and avoid poking me with a stick after the first go-round or two. And if somebody presses one of my buttons, and I overreact, (hey, it happens, I’m not really a brain in a vat!) I’ll apologize. Well, unless I’m convinced the person who got flamed is really a total waste of skin. Is it actually possible to enforce civil discourse without authoritarian actions like user ostracism or post deletion? I honestly don’t know, but it’s good that people are thinking about it.

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I just want to throw out a couple things that I’ve seen implemented on another site. I rarely comment on Fark, but I often read through the comments on there. Fark’s comment system is actually somewhat similar to Boing Boing’s but the users are quite different. Fark’s users are pretty much encouraged to troll each other. The comments there are moderated, but mostly to keep nudity out of them (please take a moment to mourn the loss of Boobies threads).

They also have two features that make reading through their giant threads a lot easier. You can block individual users and you can highlight individual users. Both features work well on Fark. I’m not sure how well they’d work on Boing Boing. Highlighting might work, but my main use for it on Fark is for skimming through large threads. Boing Boing threads generally don’t get that large and I suspect that skimming through the comments isn’t behaviour that you want to encourage. It could still be useful to help someone pick which topics to read first though. If a topic has a comment by one of your favourite commenters, you might prefer to read that first.

Now blocking users is very useful on Fark. The shithead to insightful commenter ratio on Fark is way worse than here. I’m not sure if a block list is the way to go here, but if it is, take a look at how they did it there. You can ignore a user and their actual comment isn’t shown to you, but you still see the header of the comment with the reason you ignored them. You can also easily unblock someone.

For reference, I have 80 users favourited and 21 users blocked there. I also suspect that most (but not all) of the comments that caused me to block those users on Fark would be flagged out of existence here.

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Slashdot has a similar system, where you can designate “friends” and “foes” and assign karma modifiers to them. (Fark’s actually sounds a bit better to me but I haven’t used it.) Everybody can tell who your friends and foes are, but they can’t see what your modifiers are, so the amusing thing is you can reverse the roles, giving positive modifiers to foes and negative to friends, and then tag people you don’t want to hear from as friends and people who have opinions you want to hear as foes. Confuses the hell out of people and is mildly amusing in practice.

This conversation takes me back to the days of NNTP over UUCP and killfiles.

Eh, I think we need something. Even if it just ends up being an unendorsed browser extension. Some folks are wont to post things akin to “adam and eve not adam and steve” arguments that I don’t feel rise to the occasion of being flaggable. So, I’m left either flagging when I think doing so is overboard, responding in kind, or finding some kind of killfile style solution.

I’m not sure what’s so bad about downvoting anyway. It’s negative but not inherently more so than stop signs or reasonable speed limits.