Originally Posted by
kokonutz
IMHO, the entire purpose of the entire initiative was to take the sort of posters you describe above and give them a shiny gold star, thereby hopefully holding them up as an example for others to emulate.
How such a simple concept drew so much fear, anger and concern from so many is beyond me.
koko, you are obviously a sharp cookie, and a diligent one too.
The problems can be summarized as unintended consequences:
(A) People who don't get the gold star may feel slighted and may reduce their contributions or even become irritants.
(B) The selection process could be gamed or politicized (true of any conceivable selection process) and would at a minimum be susceptible of suspicion.
The benefits did not outweigh the risks of these unintended consequences.
That's how I see it, and notice that my reasons would apply even if moderators ran the entire process. In fact, these unintended consequences, especially (A), apply today to the selection of moderators. We would be doubling that problem rather than alleviating it. I have no solution to offer other than not making things worse.
As to a democratic model being appropriate for FT, I respectfully dissent.
We all know that setting up separate power centers that will battle each other endlessly helps keep government in balance. But FT is not a government, it's a business.
No successful business that I know of is run democratically. Nor by a combination of top down command and control and bottoms up democracy.
The closest such model would be a company with a union shop, in which two hierarchies compete with each other. Such companies are less likely to succeed against their real competitors than companies with a single chain of authority. That's just what works.
The government model sets up incentives to fight each other. The business management model sets up incentives to fight external competitors. The latter is what we need, not the former. Just my opinion.