[Analysis] Why GDers don't like the CB (and what to do about it)

Hyrum Graff·5/23/2014, 2:42:50 PM·6 votes·878 views

###Premise

People like to feel like they've contributed something meaningful/made an impact.

###Facts

On GD, an upvote is an endorsement of someone's content, but has no value beyond showing community consensus.
On GD, the primary means by which content becomes visible is being posted by multiple people; the more times content is posted, the more likely people will see it.
On the CB, an upvote is both an endorsement of content AND the primary means by which content becomes visible.
If a comment does not receive upvotes, it will quickly fade to obscurity.

###Analysis

The problem here is that voting doesn't give you the same feeling of contribution as posting. It doesn't matter that voting on the CB does, in fact, have as large (or larger) of an impact toward content visibility as posting on GD; it's the feeling that matters. On the flip side, posting on the CB (if you're a latecomer to the conversation) doesn't feel as meaningful as on GD because you know that your post will likely fade into obscurity. This same effect does exist in the longer threads on GD; it's just not as extreme.

Then why do you post on the CB instead of in GD, Hyrum?

Several reasons:

In one of my first posts on the CB, I got a red response. That helped counteract feelings of not being heard.
The technical side of things, especially formatting and the notification system.
It's a smaller community, so it's easier to keep up with everything.
It's a smaller community, so I've come to know the frequent posters better, and I enjoy knowing the people with whom I'm having frequent discussions. On GD, it took me several weeks before I got to know some names; I knew Sir Armamalum's name by my second day here.

###Solution?

In general, several things need to happen, but there's no silver bullet here (they're black, actually):

People need to adopt the mindset of "vote before posting."
and either:
Posting needs to feel more meaningful
or
Voting needs to feel more meaningful.

As for the first bullet, my only idea is that people should be required to vote on a comment before replying to it. For the third bullet, I'm not sure that you can make voting feel as meaningful as commenting, even if it is the more useful function. That brings us to...

*The 2nd bullet. It's a tough one: the thing that makes posting feel meaningful is when you get visibility. But of the whole reasons Rioters tend to hang out on these forums more (and why I like reading CB discussions more) is that the discussion is easier to follow, and it's easier to see consensus. If you increase visibility, you also increase clutter, undermining the "reading experience."

My suggestion is to offer two different views: summary view, which is like the current setup, perhaps with more content hidden by default, and discussion view, which uses the "reddit style" layout, but the GD criteria for showing posts (ie, posts are only hidden if they receive a great many downvotes). People can only reply from discussion view.

What will this do? It seems like you're just putting people through unnecessary hardship!

By forcing people to read the entire discussion before commenting,

People get to see if someone else has already said what they want to say; hopefully they'll upvote it.
Hopefully, this will be conducive to keeping all the discussion on one topic, in one place.
Because people know their content is being seen, posting here feels more satisfying.
Upvotes still have value, because they're still used in deciding which content is displayed first.

And, Summary view will still exist as a convenient way to catch the drift of the thread's conversation.

######Thoughts?