On Wed, 2020-04-15 at 08:56 +0100, Neil McGovern wrote: > The point of the trust levels is to distribute the moderation. Whatever > metric we come up with, it will involve a certain amount of actually > using the site, and engaging with the community.
Looking at some topics on meta.discourse.org, people explicitly use trust levels as a "reward" tool to increase "user participation" in some metric. [1] mentions this for example, but it's not the only topic talking about reward systems or gamification in Discourse. Badges and other systems serve the same purpose. [1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/trust-level-wishlist-items/141349 > > The notifications to welcome new people or that the system hasn't seem > > someone for some time[1] also seem designed to manipulate people into > > spending more time on the system. > > Could you explain this please? I feel that having a notification (which > only appears for people who regularly interact with the site) that > someone is new to the community to be useful. I think "In a nutshell, we use computers to detect the behavior we want to see and then we use people to recognize and reward it" from the post I linked to above explains it well: the system is designed to have people say "welcome back", not because they know them, but because the computer system encourages it to further the goals of the person operating the forum (increase user participation), not because of sincere human interaction. One such system alone is probably not a problem, but taking everything together (trust level as "rewards", badges, scores, like counts, ...), Discourse certainly leaves me with the impression that it is designed to increase participation levels and time spent on the site via psychological tricks and manipulation. I don't use so-called "social" network services like Facebook because I don't like this sort of subtle manipulation, and I probably won't like Discourse much for the same reasons, even though it might be nice to use otherwise as it offers a nice feature set. I have no idea if these reward systems can be turned off for Debian's instance of Discourse. I recognize that other people will like such systems given systems like Facebook, Twitter or daily rewards for mobile games are quite popular, but some other people have mentioned they don't like the gamification aspects either. On the other hand, I like Discourse's feature set so far; the mail integration isn't that great, but at least works for basic interaction. But handling mail is complicated and like other restrictions (offline use) that's probably something I could mostly live with. So to summarize, I think technically Discourse is okay. The "rewards" and related systems would however probably not make me use the system much. Ansgar ---- Likes per Day: 12*π Total Views: ∫₋∞ᵀ viewrate(t) dt ≈ 1.3 flocks Average Read Time: 5.321 Imperial minutes, 4.323 metric minutes Total Read Time: 6.917 flock Imperial minutes, 5.620 fmm Author's Read Time: Yes #Cats In Author's Room: ~2 Suggested topics: - Debian is testing Discourse [User] https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2020/04/msg00516.html - What are your thoughts on discourse? [Devel] [Vote] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2020/03/msg00046.html - ITP: python-pydiscourse [Devel] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2020/04/msg00143.html - why dig ? I wanna use nslookup ! [Devel] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/04/msg02502.html Want to read more? Browse other recent project topics on https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2020/04/threads.html or discover all categories on https://lists.debian.org (I can do those tricks too ;-) SCNR this one time...)
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