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If you are a frequent US Politics poster, you probably noticed that the newly implemented Slow Mode option was switched on in a few major threads: USPol, GenElec, Polliwonks, and the SCOTUS thread. While Slow Mode is on, the cooldown between posts increases from something like 15 seconds to 10 minutes. We've now switched it back off for the time being (except in USPol) in order to solicit feedback on it. First, some technical limitations: ---Slow mode is a toggle: threads are either 15 second or 10 minute cooldown, we cannot set custom times. ---While it's not difficult to toggle Slow Mode, it does have to be done manually by a mod or IK. This means that a scheduled daily slow mode for peak times only isn't on the table, we can't set it to turn on when posting exceeds X posts/hour, and toggling it in response to major news blowups isn't necessarily going to be super responsive if mods or IKs aren't around. With that in mind, we would like to know: ---Were you ever personally prevented from posting by slow mode? Did you spend the time writing a longer post, waiting, or just giving up on making the post? ---As a reader, did you feel that the thread quality improved, either because of higher effort posts or at least less white noise? ---And generally, when and where do you think slow mode can be best utilized? Please stay on topic, don't make this into a grudge match. "It's good because [poster/clique I hate] could make fewer posts" is unhelpful and will be punished.
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Sep 21, 2020 16:21
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| # ? Apr 18, 2024 10:21 |
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I thought it was a good idea, although for most people I bet they didn't notice a difference. It did seem to have the affect in USPOL of reducing the amount of petty slap fighting in a very charged weekend, and also prevented people from producing the double post "my 2nd post is an obvious straw man of what I expect your rebuttal to be, checkmate" style of posting I hate. On the other hand, the slowdown didn't end up making people sit down and write more words in their posts, but I'm not going to get out a word counter and see. Perhaps if it was a permanent option, it would over time.
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Sep 21, 2020 16:32
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Is there any background info about what Slow Mode is specifically being used for?
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Sep 21, 2020 16:32
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fool of sound posted:If you are a frequent US Politics poster, you probably noticed that the newly implemented Slow Mode option was switched on in a few major threads: USPol, GenElec, Polliwonks, and the SCOTUS thread. While Slow Mode is on, the cooldown between posts increases from something like 15 seconds to 10 minutes. We've now switched it back off for the time being (except in USPol) in order to solicit feedback on it. It definitely made me think through my post more, and I was still able to participate in the thread in somewhat real time but with much better quality posts. It also eliminates most of the lol dems posts which is a welcome reprieve.
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Sep 21, 2020 16:40
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fool of sound posted:With that in mind, we would like to know: -Yes, it makes it difficult to have an actual discussion honestly. I gave up, I have other things to do. -Less slapfighting yes, same amount of low effort, shitposts and hot takes. -During super contentious times where the moderators would otherwise be unable to handle the volume of posts. Personally I think the issues with low effort and general assholery could be solved if mods would actually escalate probation length/bans based on rap sheet. Like if someone is getting a 6'er every week it's clear they aren't actually trying to improve and the probating isn't doing anything. Wouldn't stop the drive-by shitposts but maybe cut down the never-ending arguments between the same few posters.
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Sep 21, 2020 16:40
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I was impacted by slow mode exactly once. I had to wait two full minutes before I could post my post and I took that time to make the post marginally better. I really didn't mind. USPOL felt slower and I think had fewer slapflights, but that might just be because the RBG thing was in full swing just before slowmode was turned on. I didn't notice more effortposting than usual, but I wouldn't expect that until it's been in place for a few weeks. Recommendation: keep the experiment going.
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Sep 21, 2020 16:43
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What "problem" are we trying to solve? Just hoping people post better after a few minutes of quiet reflection? That is not going to happen. We frequently have issues where a long back and forth is necessary, and misunderstandings/debate will not be resolved or explained in a neat little 3 post point --> thoughtful counterpoint --> "ok i see, thanks for clearing this up for me". All this is really going to do is make people pointlessly wait at their keyboards, and cause debates to stretch over a much longer amount of time, unless they just give up in frustration. Having a few hundred posts pop up after a huge event happens is also more of an entertaining feature than a bug to eliminate, and if you don't want to read them all then you really don't have to, just skip to a page or two before the end.
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Sep 21, 2020 16:44
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Slo Mo was great. Ideally you could respond to different posters on like a 10 minute timer and non-quote posts once per hour and can't respond to the same person twice for one hour. Sometimes someone else will say something and maybe you want to talk to them while its current and its a totally separate topic from the last thing you did, I dunno.
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Sep 21, 2020 16:50
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Youth Decay posted:Personally I think the issues with low effort and general assholery could be solved if mods would actually escalate probation length/bans based on rap sheet. Like if someone is getting a 6'er every week it's clear they aren't actually trying to improve and the probating isn't doing anything. Wouldn't stop the drive-by shitposts but maybe cut down the never-ending arguments between the same few posters. I mostly lurk and have not been impacted by slow mode. But when it's on, the threads move way too slowly for my taste, and there's not enough content to make me want to really read the thread. I agree with the post I quoted wholeheartedly. It's incredibly annoying to see the same 5 shiposters break the same rules over and over and over and over and they get a 6 hour probe. If we are trying to limit poo poo posting, longer probations or bans seem like a much better way to accomplish that than slow mode.
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Sep 21, 2020 16:53
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What exactly is the point of this? Seems like some dumb poo poo ported over from Discord to a format that doesn't need it.
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Sep 21, 2020 16:56
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I liked slowmode in USPol but none of the other threads move fast enough to need it (GE and Polliwonks)
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Sep 21, 2020 16:57
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fool of sound posted:---As a reader, did you feel that the thread quality improved, either because of higher effort posts or at least less white noise? I do. People making thoughtful posts weren't throttled, all the other garbage was. Edit: Yuzenn posted:It also eliminates most of the lol dems posts which is a welcome reprieve. Agreed, this was awesome. Not that I disagree with the whole demsbad thing, but 95% of the time these posts are nothing but people coming at each other's throat. Gros Tarla fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Sep 21, 2020 |
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Sep 21, 2020 17:01
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I am a firm believer in never not post. The thread moved slower and I did not like the experiment. At the end of the day this is a comedy site, I come here to read funny reactions to live events. This forum is loving dying and any one stupid enough to pay $10 to pay for a forum online is not going to have anything worth saying no matter if you give him 10 minutes to effort post.
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Sep 21, 2020 17:07
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I really like the slow mode in USPOL - it does seem to cut down on white noise posting and screaming hot takes. I'm actually considering posting there now instead of just scrolling as quickly as possible to at least attempt to filter out the lovely posts.
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Sep 21, 2020 17:09
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I don't post much so it didn't really affect my posting personally. I thought it improved post quality to some extent and reduced slap fights, at least in USPOL, outside of that I don't think it did much but I don't read the general election thread because it's just too toxic to read or post in so ymmv as far as that goes. In the SCOTUS thread I think we self moderated well enough. I wish you could reduce slow mode to like 5 minutes instead of 10, there isn't much to read in USPOL, but if you can't do that I'm fine with it being on for the really bad threads since I do think it helped in USPOL. Is the timer put on the poster or is it only for posting in that specific thread? Like if someone posts in USPOL with slow mode on can they immediately post elsewhere? If so I don't think slow mode will do much of anything for drive by shitposting, they'll just spread the trolling around to different threads and cycle back around once the timer is done.
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Sep 21, 2020 17:16
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I enjoy slow mode in USPOL, not sure if the polls thread needs it though. It cuts down on bad posts and if the mods are understandably hesitant about ramping punishments during the site sale and also general political craziness that is going on right now then it is a good temporary fix. It has stopped me from posting, but only on the tail end with like, 2 minutes remaining.
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Sep 21, 2020 17:17
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Another annoyance with slow mode is we often have multiple subjects of discussion going on simultaneously even within the same thread, and people are not going to want to summarize their posts into longer comprehensive digests quoting people one by one on the different things they are responding to. Some people actually do sometimes do that, but thats annoying. And again, for what purpose? Are we trying to throttle people who post a lot just to make it easier for lurkers to read?
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Sep 21, 2020 17:22
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I know the OP explicitly says this is not possible, but if the timer were reduced to five minutes, I feel it would find a better medium between slowing down slap-fights and allowing a freer exchange of ideas. I have found myself prevented from posting a few times with 2-3 minutes on the timer and felt that the discussion had moved on from whatever I had wanted to post by the time the full ten minutes was up.
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Sep 21, 2020 17:32
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Rigel posted:Another annoyance with slow mode is we often have multiple subjects of discussion going on simultaneously even within the same thread, and people are not going to want to summarize their posts into longer comprehensive digests quoting people one by one on the different things they are responding to. Some people actually do sometimes do that, but thats annoying. I endorse combining a couple quotes into one post, but it gets unwieldy when you start getting past three or so. Slowmode only impacted me a couple times, and as it happens each time it was in an environment where I could easily just edit my post on that page rather than making a new one. I feel like it improved the reader experience in USPOL specifically and it definitely improved the IK experience. Antifa Turkeesian posted:I know the OP explicitly says this is not possible, but if the timer were reduced to five minutes, I feel it would find a better medium between slowing down slap-fights and allowing a freer exchange of ideas. I have found myself prevented from posting a few times with 2-3 minutes on the timer and felt that the discussion had moved on from whatever I had wanted to post by the time the full ten minutes was up. Either changing the second toggle to five minutes or (ideally) adding a five minute toggle does seem like it might be a decent idea that would see use in USPOL and other fast-but-not-ridiculous threads.
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Sep 21, 2020 17:36
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I personally don't care for it. I think it tends to slow down discussion. Yes, it comes at the expense of white noise, but I have really learned a lot from the intelligent discussions in the threads and having to wait 10 minutes to respond if you have a good point to make is counterproductive to that, imo.
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Sep 21, 2020 17:37
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fool of sound posted:---While it's not difficult to toggle Slow Mode, it does have to be done manually by a mod or IK. This means that a scheduled daily slow mode for peak times only isn't on the table, we can't set it to turn on when posting exceeds X posts/hour, and toggling it in response to major news blowups isn't necessarily going to be super responsive if mods or IKs aren't around. Since you're doing all this through a web UI we could write a selenium script that makes the necessary changes and then have that run as a cron job on some free cloud box, looking up credentials securely from a crypto store of some kind at execution time This is a forum full of computer touchers and building something like this sounds like a saturday project to me Hell, make it a weekend project, put a react UI in front of it with some kind of lightweight DB that lets you maintain a list of different threads and how they should be metered Generally, I dislike this feature, FWIW Cabbages and Kings fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Sep 21, 2020 |
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Sep 21, 2020 17:41
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BigBallChunkyTime posted:I personally don't care for it. I think it tends to slow down discussion. Yes, it comes at the expense of white noise, but I have really learned a lot from the intelligent discussions in the threads and having to wait 10 minutes to respond if you have a good point to make is counterproductive to that, imo. 6 posts an hour per person gently caress man when did the rations get this bad
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Sep 21, 2020 17:45
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If it can be applied to specific threads, I think it would be great to keep on for certain megathreads like USPOL. I regularly stopped following the thread because I'd wake up to 200+ new posts, most of which were-frankly-low effort "cheerlead" posts about whatever new Trump tweet just happened. With slow mode on people in busy threads are incentivized to both make their post worth reading, and make it clear as possible because they wont be able to immediately respond. It can be a bit more annoying in slower, smaller threads, though.
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Sep 21, 2020 17:58
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From my perspective, it completely stifled the conversation during an important news weekend. If the point is just to make it so there’s less need for moderation by limiting the total number of posts, then it does that just fine. If the goal is improving the quality of conversation or promoting better posting, well, all it does is limit the number of posts. It’s still the same posters. I like reading posts here (my brain is loving broken) and I like it when I don’t run out of posts to read, which I did all the time during slow mode. If this is the only way to effectively moderate some threads, it seems like there are way worse problems and no slowdown is going to fix those—but if it’s the only way, it’s the only way. And my preferences aside, from an objective standpoint, the world is better with fewer D&D posts.
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Sep 21, 2020 17:59
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I wasn't personally impacted, but I'm not a fan. It seemed like the quality of discussion went down with people abandoning discussions. I'd have to guess that they didn't want to have to wait around either for somebody else to be able to reply or to be able to reply themselves.
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Sep 21, 2020 18:08
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rko posted:If the point is just to make it so there’s less need for moderation by limiting the total number of posts, then it does that just fine. I mean, I assume if that's the end goal, it would probably be easier to just escalate probations/bans to the usual suspects coming on to get their daily sixer harvest.
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Sep 21, 2020 18:08
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As an intermittent poster, I liked the change, even though it did get in the way of some back-and-forth conversation at one point. If somebody makes a good post that I want to reply to in a fast-moving thread, and I read it a few hours and a bunch of pages later, it seems pointless to respond. Discussion's moved on, window's closed, chance missed. Slow mode makes it easier to catch up, and it seems like it's less of an issue to bring up a post from 80 posts ago rather than 500 posts ago, even if 450 of those posts were white noise. If slow mode can cut out most of the white noise and not too much of the genuine back-and-forth, it seems like a worthwhile change. If I just want a constant feed of Content without worrying about quality or thought, twitter and youtube are easy enough to get to.
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Sep 21, 2020 18:15
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:6 posts an hour per person These are the posts I live for. I found this funny, I had a nice laugh and felt good for 30 seconds. These shouldn't be behind a 10 minute wall. Maybe have a slow-mode thread?
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Sep 21, 2020 18:21
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Love slow mo mode
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Sep 21, 2020 18:31
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I don’t post all that often and I didn’t find myself up against the timer. It did seem like USPOL improved somewhat after the timer was instituted, though I wouldn’t say the change was huge. Honestly I find myself a little indifferent on it, but having a bit longer to see how it goes (particularly not over a weekend with a huge news story) would be useful I think.
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Sep 21, 2020 18:49
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Ohhh that explains why the USPOL thread didn't have a gajillion new posts when I was checking it over the weekend. I mostly just lurk in there and I noticed some difference. I guess it's better (?). There was surprisingly little pettiness compared to what I expected.
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Sep 21, 2020 18:55
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Hopefully this remains constructive longer than the QCS thead did! I wasn't impacted by slowmode as I was otherwise occupied this weekend. In addition, my posting style tends not to conflict with slowmode (a damning indictment of the feature, imo). I do think it's likely to drown out a lot of TVIV posting with pressers and other live events. I lean lightly towards that being a net loss, but liveposting tends to engender strong belief on both sides. As a part of a suite of reforms, I'm fine keeping it... but I think it trades functionality for curing some of the symptoms of larger AmeriPol issues in D&D. With that said, my preference would be that it's always on in the threads selected if we're going to have it. The forums should react predictably for users and I don't think repeatedly toggling gets there. A compromise, I suppose, would be modifying the thread title to reflect when it's on.
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Sep 21, 2020 19:01
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I mostly just post in the General Election thread (don't really post in USPol), but it didn't seem to really make things better or worse there. Overall it might be a good idea, at least for that thread - it seems like it wouldn't make a difference 95% of the time, but it might be helpful during that other 5% when there's some sort of heated exchange. I imagine the difference was far more noticeable in a thread like USPol. One thing that I'm unclear about - does this impact editing posts? I'm guessing it doesn't. If it did, that would be pretty annoying (I frequently will edit replies to other posts into an existing post), but if it doesn't there's no problem.
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Sep 21, 2020 19:03
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Slo mode is ok, only ran into it once. It didn't seem to increase the length of posts, but I think that's fine. Longer posts are not necessarily better posts, and often contain several discrete points which is not the best use of the discussion forum format. If the objective was to ease the burden on the moderators, it is obviously going to be a success; less posts mean less opportunities for mod action. A ten minute timer isn't going to keep people from posting about their enemies or other forums crimes, as seen below, but I guess it was never the intention to completely remove the need for mods. Yuzenn posted:It also eliminates most of the lol dems posts which is a welcome reprieve.
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Sep 21, 2020 19:05
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fool of sound posted:With that in mind, we would like to know: Prevented? Not specifically, not as in "I want to post but cannot because of the timer". I usually write fairly long posts. When I first saw the timer it made me just not want to post again in the thread (the GE thread) at all. I'm certainly not going to wait around to post again, this place is already enough of a mental drain. fool of sound posted:---As a reader, did you feel that the thread quality improved, either because of higher effort posts or at least less white noise? No, I don't actually think post length and quality have anything to do with one another. I think what it encourages is posting something and then leaving the thread, resulting in stilted discussion that is less interesting to read. It also, in my opinion, stymies active discussion in favor of just bloviating to no one in particular. Personally, my least favorite types of posts to read are one person responding to like 10 different quoted posts from two pages ago. I would much rather those be individual responses since it's easier to track. fool of sound posted:---And generally, when and where do you think slow mode can be best utilized? Megathreads, when mods are overwhelmed, or when some big event occurs that's going to overwhelm them. I think this tool is primarily of benefit to the moderating team, and we shouldn't act like it's going to improve or affect posting quality. The solution is ultimately more moderators and better application of the existing rules, but if rate limiting helps the current mod team keep up, fine. If you have a problem with a specific type or style of posting, try clarifying the rules and ramping punishments. I think we could also cut down on "the entire content of my post is a twitter link that I'm allowing to speak on my behalf" poo poo if we're worried about posting quality. Generally speaking, when I see a bad post one of my first thoughts isn't "if only this poster had spent more time on this post it would be better". If we want individual posters to be on a timeout, that's what probations are for. I think most of the perceived benefits to posting quality ITT stem from the fact that rule-breaking posters are probed before they can derail the whole thread when they're rate limited.
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Sep 21, 2020 19:10
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30 seconds is reasonable. 10 minutes is not. The speed of discussion means that within 10 minutes your dogpiled and ave to basically wait to explain your point further. If person A responds to person B and personal B responded 3 minutes after personn A. The discussion will last 13-26 minutes per 2 posts. Which basically means you can strawman much harder since no one can respond for At least 8 mins.
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Sep 21, 2020 19:23
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Paracaidas posted:I do think it's likely to drown out a lot of TVIV posting with pressers and other live events.
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Sep 21, 2020 19:34
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I honestly didn't notice a difference in the two slowmoded threads that I read regularly, which is the SCOTUS thread and the polls thread. I can imagine there might have been more back and forth in the SCOTUS thread without it, given what happened over the weekend, but in the end I thought relative to how they normally are the quality and quantity of posts ended up being more or less consistent in both threads.
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Sep 21, 2020 19:34
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As a USPOL lurker, I didn't really see too much of a difference in terms of post quality as a result of slowmode. It was the same, just fewer of them. It did probably prevent some of the more frenzied posts and slapfights that would have come from the RBG news, but of course there's no way to prove that. If the goal is to prevent dumb white noise posts, I guess I'd rather see those kinds of posts dealt with by longer probations to remove the problematic posters from the discussion, rather than inhibiting everyone's ability to post.
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Sep 21, 2020 19:45
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| # ? Apr 18, 2024 10:21 |
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As someone who mostly lurks, I liked the change, because I felt like it helped to cut down on the white noise and encouraged people to put some thought into their posts. I might actually start following USPol again—right now I just follow Poliwonks because its signal-to-noise ratio is so much higher. Five minutes would probably be better than ten, but ten was fine if five is infeasible. I'm fine with running out of posts to read, so long as the posts that I did read were interesting and informative. For what it's worth, I'd also like to see escalating punishments for people who repeatedly break the rules. A sixer is useful as a warning / enforced cool-down period, but if a poster is eating multiple sixers per week without improvement then I think it's clear that more is needed to encourage the user to change their posting, or failing that, to limit the amount that they can post. E: I didn't notice much change in the Poliwonks or SCOTUS threads, so it's probably unnecessary for those threads since they already have a culture of people putting more effort into posts. VikingofRock fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Sep 21, 2020 |
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Sep 21, 2020 19:58
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