I think IronStylus just inadvertently found a flaw in reddit style posts

How much of that is due to the small number of posters as compared to GD? Right now, of course it's easier to parse these boards, there are less people posting here and most strict moderation as to what topics go where, so you can easily go in the 'Skin & Champion Concepts' boards and ask for ideas there.

GD, meanwhile, is a smorgasboard of whatever people feel like posting. Occasional mods pop in to delete bad threads or move unrelated threads but GD has been entrenched as 'that place where you post if you want Riot to respond' because Rioters only respond there or the bug forums. If the boards beta becomes 'that place where you post if you want Riot to respond' you're getting a bunch of 'CHAMP OP PLZ NERF' and 'EAST COAST SERVERS WHERE' here. And it's easy to say 'oh, the community will downvote those' but in GD they tend to get lots of upvotes.

I can understand wanting a new forum, after the terrible mismanagement and culture that's developed the old one. I'm just not a big fan of the reddit style. That's great for news posts, absolute shit for actual discussions.

Wouldn't it simply be best to look at the "problem" from a solution perspective?

Posts after the thread reaches, say, 100 posts are highly unlikely to be read, and thus garner minimal upvotes, and thus stagnate or take forever to percolate upwards.

I'm sure that you guys can analyze the data to view the percentage of thread readers that upvote a post, sorted by its distance from the top of the page. Then its just a matter of providing upvotes increased power on new posts, based on their distance from the top of the thread.

So if the average post in a "hot" thread, with 50 posts above it (including nested) gets 2 upvotes/hour, while the top 5 posts accrue 10-30/hour, then the system could simply apply that to a new thread as such: If a new post is made 90 minutes after the thread become front-page material, and is deemed to gain upvotes at about 10% the speed of top posts, then if it receives 10% as many upvotes during the first 30 minutes of its life, than the board can elevate it to within the top 10 posts.

Once this "potential" post has been elevated, the system merely needs to compare the votes it gets to the votes the other top posts are receiving, and move it up/down based on that. Once moved, an arbitrary number of upvotes is the threshold (lets say 50). After any top post receives 50 upvotes, the "potential" post is checked for its votes, and moved to a proper position in the thread based on that comparison, with its upvotes artificially adjusted to make it have the right number for its new position. No further attention needs to be paid to that post, since it has the proper votes for its position, and will receive the attention it has earned.

No, that's the specific case of 1) dev asking for feedback and 2) players providing feedback.

Obviously the boards have several different uses and aren't going to be relegated to be a one-way street to dev-land.

I can understand how from a dev's perspective, you enjoy being able to look at a thread and be able to, at a glance, figure out what opinions are popular amongst the playerbase. I understand that you apparently go through the less popular opinions as well. But amongst other players, I severely doubt that many will put in the effort. The League forums are already an echo chamber, full of people agreeing with people who have had the same opinion since the thread started, and this would merely make it worse.

Be as skeptical as you like. I encourage you to be. Be critical and offer solutions to the team developing these boards. And do it now while there's less of a population, as you've stated, you'll be a larger voice in a smaller group of people. Better chances of being heard.

Unfortunately, my suggestion of 'burn it down, start over' was not received very well amongst the dev team.

First off, not an anti-Reddit partisan. I've never used Reddit, and have only the foggiest idea why some people have such antipathy towards it. Boards is definitely a step up overall, though it will be interesting to see how it scales up as more people migrate over.

I do have one challenge in carrying on a conversation on the boards. If I'm talking to someone, and it's not in a popular thread of the discussion, I'll often struggle to post in it again. Clicking on their post from my updates doesn't always take me there, and it then takes a large number of somewhat blind expands and searches to find their response to me.

Certainly, this is no worse than in the classical threaded structure, where I'd have to search a potentially large number of pages, and wouldn't have the updates to help out. Still, it's an element of the system that could use improvement.

Also, this structure makes it harder for discussions to evolve. I've seen some good threads that start out on one topic, and end up about something entirely different. That's harder here.

You want your voice heard? Continue to speak! It's really that simple.

I´m pretty sure everyone wants their voice heard, though this sort of is a problem here - as the first voices will become the loudest voices very quickly + there´s no option to bump a thread if you posted it on a bad time to be heard (low activity)...so the only option is reposting the same thing over and over. Not sure if that´s a great solution.

The same concerns I've heard about the discussion format are the same problems I've experienced on GD. "Circlejerks", upvoted/bumped spam, voices not being heard, etc. Those problems exist and worse on GD in my opinion as things currently stand.

Not disagreeing here entirely, but that´s just the problem I have with the Boards currently. Instead of trying to fix some issues that are present it seems like all you want to achieve is recoulouring the same old thing. So the Problems remain on the new Boards aswell

I don't think there's any evidence, at least that would convince me, that this format hurts discussion. My experience has been different.

This is another part where I think the Boards are pretty imissleading: Yes, it´s very conveniant to have a 1 on 1 Discussion, as the personal inbox makes it very easy to follow responses and respond to them. Really a great improvement right there...the problem however is, the discussion shifts into privacy if it goes on over some back and forth, no matter how good it is. In the GD-format the discussions where a lot more public and visible...here they tend to disappear behind a big wall of "show more"-buttons, no matter how good they turn out to be (long back and forths tend to be the most productive sort of discussions, at least if both sides are open-minded)

Also, considering I've experienced none of the toxicity I've run into on GD over in this neck of the woods, I'd say the experience has been pretty good. Things stay on track, interactions have been polite and spirited and discussions have been easily tracked.

I think this really comes down to the people attending the Boards, not to the mechanisms of the Boards itself. As a F.E.K. user i only have a small amount of People in the GD Blacklisted and it is quite a peacefull place for me most of the times with some rather good discussions (and some nonsense here and there, but well...it´s GD after all). I too enjoy the atmosphere on these Boards currently, no doubt about that - but it is really unrelated to the deeper problems that run with the visability-mechanisms.

I´m really not opposing these Boards...I like the coulours, I really like the inbox (though for me personally the my-updates page seems to be down today for some reason) - I think it has great potential. But I also think it needs more confidence to aspire sth more than being a sort of reddit 2.0. THe current Format doesn´t solve any issues the old GD had, it only recolours them.

I'll still stand by the notion that the format is viewed as an anathema because of an inherent revulsion certain members have as a pre-existing bias. They bring their concerns about reddit here and fear the same results they see as negatives in the discussion based format. I can understand it, but I've seen far more benefit than detriment. You want your voice heard? Continue to speak! It's really that simple. The same concerns I've heard about the discussion format are the same problems I've experienced on GD. "Circlejerks", upvoted/bumped spam, voices not being heard, etc. Those problems exist and worse on GD in my opinion as things currently stand.

At first this sounds like reasonable advice. The problem is that if you want to talk about something that most people will just upvote and move on, you'll be making the same thread multiple times a day and then the mods will come after you for spamming. For example, if I made a thread right now discussing the absolutely abominable particle/hitbox mismatches present on a number of abilities, I'd initially get a bunch of upvotes, an bunch of posts saying "yeah I agree X happened to me!", and that's it. Nobody would actually have anything else to say on the matter, and the discussion would quickly fall off the front page. Let's be honest here, the only reason this thread is still alive is because you personally are still here discussing it. If you stopped replying, this thread would die almost immediately, and would quickly drop off the page as more champion suggestions (that I'm pretty sure Riot doesn't even look at on principle?) come and go, washing this thread away with them.

I don't think there's any evidence, at least that would convince me, that this format hurts discussion. My experience has been different. Also, considering I've experienced none of the toxicity I've run into on GD over in this neck of the woods, I'd say the experience has been pretty good. Things stay on track, interactions have been polite and spirited and discussions have been easily tracked.

And in my experience, I've watched utter nonsense threads stick on the front page for days while legitimate discussion gets upvotes but not comments and slides away into obscurity.

Also, considering I've experienced none of the toxicity I've run into in GD over in this neck of the woods,

We've had this conversation before. Over the past 5 years, Riot staff have (unintentionally) conditioned the forumgoing playerbase that if you want Riot to read what you type out, you have to post it in GD. This leads to anyone wanting anyone to read anything needing to post it in GD. Because the overwhelming majority of people are in GD, the trolls will be in GD. Combine that with the... lackluster moderation over the years and you get today's GD. I'm really tired of hearing this implication from Tamat that GD is the spawn of all evil because it's GD. It got this way because of how Rioters interacted with it. It didn't just magically occur on it's own.

I think your POV is a little slanted here. As the OP you are getting a msg of every post that is throwing an idea at you. You get to see a new reply directly to your post.

But for the people that are coming in it will not be doing that. They are going to see the Top 50 so posts and then leave it at that. The top post are usually posts that come for day 1. This is cause those early posts are going to get more visible traffic. If someone has a great idea day 3 or POV on a topic responding directly to the original post is not going to get seen by many people. Their are people that have been reading and up-voting specific posts and they are at 10+.

This board rewards people who were first. Sure people have to vote but i have seen people up vote some really bad ideas before. You said again in this thread that the community will filter. This has never worked before and will not work with Riot.

According to some poll data most of the forum goers are 15-18. So you are asking people that as a culture that we say are not legally capable for their decisions, to filter things for on the forums. You got to joking.

Oh, when I offered a detailed analysis of the problem with a potential solution, and you just brushed it off... I might have made the assumption you weren't interested in sympathizing with our position. (Not my position. You can look throughout the entire thread and find a ton of people who agree.)

And a feedback process that does not produce changes that the community desires is most accurately described as a reacharound. It is indicative of an act meant to distract from the fact that you are getting bent over. I'm sorry if that is too vulgar for your sensitive tastes, but I strive for effective imagery.