The formatting of reddit is much better, in terms of replying to comments and sorting between good and bad comments, so why don’t we use this?
Often times I am trying to find info on a thread and lots of posts are relevant but not exactly what I am looking for. It is hard/impossible to look at every reply to find a solution. The way comments on Reddit are sorted and voted on would help this.
The only downside I can see is that you can’t sort by topic e.g Electronics, Technical, Programming etc.
For the same reason Google Plus failed. An active, knowledgable, relevant, and above all large community is much more important for a website of this nature than any minor format improvements. And I would argue that for a vast majority of topics on Chiefdelphi, sorting based on voting would not add to, and in many cases would actively detract from, the effectiveness of the site.
Why? If people upvote good comments and downvote bad (usually non-relevant comments that are far too common), wouldn’t that help the madness of a thread such as the game hint one with >400 replies. People want to see game speculations that make sense. The best guess at this years game may be lost on page 15 somewhere…
I agree with Joe, and would add that, as much as FIRST strives for outreach, a community like CD gains some benefits from being a little secluded. On here, it’s FIRST and more FIRST (and yes, there can be some other small things, but you know what I mean). It maintains a unique and special level of FIRST GP and congeniality that, while not perfect, is better than many other places out on the high seas of the internet. And, if you look at Reddit, you’ll quickly notice that it is a bit cold to the idea of users’ identities. Comments come with a little username at the top, and that’s it. It clashes with CD’s style of presenting a much more communal feel. Each post is topped with an optional avatar, WAI picture, name, AKA, team, team role, and all that. These are people who know each other offline, and I think they all like being reminded of that a little bit.
Why do people still go to their local pub for years on end instead of the new chain restaurants? It’s the same reason: the atmosphere.
CD is much easier to keep track of. Especially with the portal, I can be subscribed to the subforums I care about and actively browse. You can’t really do that without making multiple subreddits.
Plus there’s less anonymity here, and I like it that way.
If it was up to me, the game hint thread would be LOCKED and the key thrown away after the first 5 pages. Anything beyond that is redundant. Why? Keep reading.
The bigger problem, and here’s where you’re really going to get the pushback, is that most times there’s redundancy/non-relevant comments, it’s just someone who doesn’t know the pulse of CD yet, just wants to make their voice heard, or has a simple question that’s been answered before and doesn’t know how to search (or doesn’t want to bother reading a massive thread–which is where that massive game hint thread comes from, people want to get their speculation out and don’t want to check and see if someone else had it. I corrected 2 different people with the same very wrong theory about 5-10 pages apart, and then someone else took the second of those another 5-10 pages later to correct a third person.). Put something like what you’re proposing in place, and watch all those people just disappear. Why? Because they will get shoved down to the bottom. They won’t get any answers.
I’d rather have to point out a rule 5 times to 5 different new people–and possibly be better able to help them out on other topics!–than to have those 5 people all see a “high-rated” thread and not get the rest of the help they might need easily.
What’s wrong with that sort of comment?
CD is not just technical. Trust me. There’ve been discussions for YEARS about doing away with Chit-Chat and making the site more technical… and nothing’s happened (and nothing’s going to happen, I don’t think) because it gives a more welcoming feel.
Chief delphi has a very powerful search and organization feature. People log in to the same account they’ve used since 2002, and all their old posts are still here. If we all went to reddit we’d lose all of our old posts, many of which are still extremely useful.
Also, the reputation system and the awesome moderators we have here keep the discussion really clean and kind.
I’m not super familiar with reddit, but I don’t think they have as good of an organization and reputation and private messaging system like we have.
Personally, I love the look of chief delphi. It loads really fast because its an older design, which is great because I have slow internet.
But that’s the glory of reddit. It gives new questions a chance to be answered. You can still sort by popularity but their questions wouldn’t be shoved at the bottom of the stack. Also, you’d only downvote the worst of the worst. This would help keep the threads small by having good answers and new questions at the top, and not so good answers and irrelevant comments at the bottom.
Ever watch someone’s reputation bar turn red in under an hour? I have. Some folks have no trouble just dishing out negative reputation–and I’d be more than willing to bet that most of those folks would have no trouble just downvoting any thread that they felt was “in the way”. No matter if the question was answered or not!
Just to continue with the reputation example for a moment: I very rarely give out reputation. Why? Because I’ve got a lot of “rep power”, and can (relatively) easily boost–or demolish–someone’s rep points. With that great power comes great responsibility to use it wisely. (Suffice it to say: I’ve never dished out red reputation, primarily because 47 or more other people have usually beaten me to it.)
CD does have a thread rating system. I can’t say I’ve ever used it, but I’m pretty sure I know how to if I ever decide to.
(Full disclosure: I fall firmly in the “hates game hint threads, game speculation threads, and overanalysis of FIRST’s actions threads” camp. I’d be more than happy to see these topics move elsewhere, but that’s another topic. I am also an active reddit user, and am quite familiar with how it works)
Threads like the game hint thread are one of the few examples where the format may be effective, just due to their sheer size. However, I think you’ll find that even there, it may not work. On a reddit thread of comparable size, the vast majority of users only make a single post, and then leave. Popular comments develop comment trees off of them, also with most users commenting once and leaving. You don’t get the repeat, back-and-forth type of discussion you see throughout a thread like that. On reddit, such comments would stack up to the point of invisibility behind “load more comments” buttons. Additionally, in order to get visibility, or pretend internet points, many people have made their own posts on r/frc for their game hint related content, whereas CD has done a pretty good job at keeping it in one thread (thanks in part to moderators, but largely due to the norms of our site as compared to reddit). As someone not interested in this kind of thing, r/frc us unusable to me at the moment, whereas CD is just fine.
Now, lets look at a whole bunch of cases where it wouldn’t work at all:
Discussion of news (blog posts, team updates, etc.). Again, these discussions tend to be highly back-and-forth in nature, whereas on reddit, it’ll be a few highly voted opinions, and not much else.
Pretty much anything controversial (Student/Mentor work distribution, Ri3D, etc.), which has a strong majority opinion among the community. On Chiefdelphi, posting a dissenting view will generate discussion, which makes for good, informative reading, and potentially changed views on both sides. On Reddit, it just gets hidden.
Quick technical questions which only merit a few replies. With a popular enough reddit, these posts would need to accure mass interest in the form of upvotes to even be seen by the majority of the community. You end up being at the mercy of the general interest of your question in order to get meaningful answers.
CAD reviews, robot releases, code releases, website releases, etc. All have the same root problem: Cool things from dominant teams will rise to the top, while the teams that need help and who can perhaps benefit the most from a community like this will sink, because people use the upvote button as an “Oh cool!” button, instead of a “get these guys visibility!” button.
Discussion of anything of regional interest. Since most people won’t care, it won’t be seen. Here, you can filter.
Also, I’m going to go ahead and point out that of the top 25 posts of all time on r/frc, the breakdown is as follows:
9 mildly funny, but meaningless and tangentially related images (most being bad photoshop jobs)
8 memes
A screencap from FRC Confessions
A reaction GIF
A joke CAD (Accumulating more than twice the votes of the highest voted legitimate CAD review post)
A news item presented in GIF form
A photo of another team’s robot, with a title arguably making fun of it
A post congratulating the 2014 championships winners (to their credit, top post of all time)
A genuinely touching post about a user’s FRC experience over the years
A genuinely cool feat of engineering on an FRC robot
Interesting/funny? Maybe (I’d argue that various facebook pages are effectively filling this role). Comparable to ChiefDelphi in value? Not even close; I’m really only interested in three out of the 25. Increasing the community’s size won’t impact the kind of content that inevitably rises to the top with a voting system.
Others have also made excellent points about anonymity. On reddit, using your real name is frowned upon. Here, we can get to know each other as people.
I think this thread itself is actually a good example of why we all like to stick with CD. Imagine if we all did use Reddit, and this thread came up. Now, obviously, it wouldn’t because it’s a moot point then, but imagine that you were proposing something else of the same nature.
Here, most people are not jumping on your side and are instead providing critiques and counterarguments. Nonetheless, a useful discussion is ongoing because this thread’s activity is keeping it high on the Portal’s Recent Activity list and people are seeing it. If this question were posed in a voting system forum, it would see a small reaction in the beginning and then be modestly downvoted (I presume, just based on how people are responding) because it’s not a popular idea, and would be seen at the top no longer, essentially killing it off. None of this productive dialogue would occur, and that would be a shame. As a population, it takes challenging thoughts to keep us sharp and active, and we are making CD a better place because of it.
You don’t downvote because you disagree, you downvote “bad” posts. Like if someone posted a photo of a cat, you’d downvote that, not because you don’t like the photo, but because it serves no purpose to FRC.
I think that’s an overly-idealistic take on things. Anywhere there is voting involved, the end result to some degree reflects a popularity contest. And even if it didn’t go down, it would probably stay not much better than neutral and would nonetheless be partially drowned behind hot-button or hugely popular threads like the game hint and the never-gonna-die over-3400-posts-strong “You know you’ve overdosed on FIRST when…” threads.
And how many people would actually adhere to that?
Again, you’re giving too much credit to the humans around here. Look at Joe’s post above: of the top 25 currently on there, 19 are that cat photo, or some reasonable equivalent!
