Talkboard vs. Social Engineering
Oct 16, 2001, 1:28 pm
#1
Original Poster
Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: Commuting around the mid-atlantic and rust-belt on any number of RJs
Programs: TSA Random Selectee Platinum, * Gold, SPG/HH/MR mid-tier, and a tiny bag of pretzels.
Posts: 9,255
Talkboard vs. Social Engineering
I find a discussion about a "code of ethics" to be both intriguing and depressing at the same time. Let me elaborate:
I'll start by putting forth a couple of basic assumptions about how I see flytertalk. It's Randy's sandbox. Randy has every right in the world to tell people when and how they can play in his sandbox. From time to time, he's thrown people out of the sandbox. Having said that, I personally think Randy has done a pretty good job letting us play in his sandbox, since he gets to maintain the sandbox, pay for the sandbox, and pay other people to keep the sandbox from falling down. Now, he's basically asked the population of the sandbox to vote on a spread of people to advise him how to make the sandbox a better place.
That having been said, I think that there is a better way to attack this problem. If somebody wants to urinate in the sandbox, they should probably be booted out. However, the problem here is that nobody's definition of what is or is not urination is going to really matter, except for Randy's or the definition that he might choose to take from the talkboard. This might be problematic, since Randy's definition might be different that the talkboard's, and theirs might differ from mine, and so on. I don't think that the FT community wants something like that to happen (unless of course Randy does, in which case we have to live with it because it is, after all, his sandbox).
Instead, I'd suggest that the talkboard ought to at least ask the folks at webflyer if there is any way to filter each view of flytertalk, to a particular user's tastes. Perhaps some of you who still read USENET can see where I'm headed with this--we need a "killfile" capability. That way, if somebody is, in your mind, urinating in the sandbox, you dump them in the killfile, and never see what they have to say. Ideally, you would also whack any responses to what they have to say as well, but I'm much more technically familiar with how a newsreader works than I am with UBB.
This does work, folks. Social Engineering at it's very finest. If you killfile two people flaming away at each other, eventually you reach the point where only those two people ever see each other's posts. If you killfile somebody who is just disrupting the general community, they too will eventually go away because nobody will see what they have to say.
This approach allows each person to very carefully select what they see and whom they see it from. In an ideal world, you would not need technology to do this--we'd just use our own intrinsic set of filters. This can be very difficult to do at times, and I think it's unreasonable to suggest that people should just "let well enough alone" under certain flaming circumstances. I think we ought to then see if there is a way to "let the machine do it for us."
I don't particularly have views or allegiances on the current "big" flamewars going on here on FT. I don't read the CO board. I try to avoid political threads in OMNI. If the talkboard suggests to Randy a code of conduct/ethics/whatever to try to prevent personal attacks, that's fine--it is his sandbox. But let's take a look at other ways to approach it first.
My $0.02. Feel free to vote me out of the sandbox
.
------------------
Saving the world, one clue at a time.
I'll start by putting forth a couple of basic assumptions about how I see flytertalk. It's Randy's sandbox. Randy has every right in the world to tell people when and how they can play in his sandbox. From time to time, he's thrown people out of the sandbox. Having said that, I personally think Randy has done a pretty good job letting us play in his sandbox, since he gets to maintain the sandbox, pay for the sandbox, and pay other people to keep the sandbox from falling down. Now, he's basically asked the population of the sandbox to vote on a spread of people to advise him how to make the sandbox a better place.
That having been said, I think that there is a better way to attack this problem. If somebody wants to urinate in the sandbox, they should probably be booted out. However, the problem here is that nobody's definition of what is or is not urination is going to really matter, except for Randy's or the definition that he might choose to take from the talkboard. This might be problematic, since Randy's definition might be different that the talkboard's, and theirs might differ from mine, and so on. I don't think that the FT community wants something like that to happen (unless of course Randy does, in which case we have to live with it because it is, after all, his sandbox).
Instead, I'd suggest that the talkboard ought to at least ask the folks at webflyer if there is any way to filter each view of flytertalk, to a particular user's tastes. Perhaps some of you who still read USENET can see where I'm headed with this--we need a "killfile" capability. That way, if somebody is, in your mind, urinating in the sandbox, you dump them in the killfile, and never see what they have to say. Ideally, you would also whack any responses to what they have to say as well, but I'm much more technically familiar with how a newsreader works than I am with UBB.
This does work, folks. Social Engineering at it's very finest. If you killfile two people flaming away at each other, eventually you reach the point where only those two people ever see each other's posts. If you killfile somebody who is just disrupting the general community, they too will eventually go away because nobody will see what they have to say.
This approach allows each person to very carefully select what they see and whom they see it from. In an ideal world, you would not need technology to do this--we'd just use our own intrinsic set of filters. This can be very difficult to do at times, and I think it's unreasonable to suggest that people should just "let well enough alone" under certain flaming circumstances. I think we ought to then see if there is a way to "let the machine do it for us."
I don't particularly have views or allegiances on the current "big" flamewars going on here on FT. I don't read the CO board. I try to avoid political threads in OMNI. If the talkboard suggests to Randy a code of conduct/ethics/whatever to try to prevent personal attacks, that's fine--it is his sandbox. But let's take a look at other ways to approach it first.
My $0.02. Feel free to vote me out of the sandbox
.------------------
Saving the world, one clue at a time.
Oct 16, 2001, 9:16 pm
#3
Join Date: Sep 2001
Posts: 40
(But the sandbox right now is pretty darn good IMO.)