General > General Technical Chat
Designated "Expert" Forum Users?
eugene:
--- Quote from: Ranayna on February 17, 2022, 10:52:09 am ---As long as non technical posts can get thanks, this is a meaningless metric.
--- End quote ---
If we don't see a user rank, but only the number of thanks received by a particular post, then the metric can be meaningful.
MK14:
As regards the topic, Designated "Expert" Forum Users?
I think NOT having any significant expert rating system, is the best course of action. Getting perhaps three answers, from users with varying levels of experience/expertise, is useful, in my opinion. For beginners, intermediates and experts asking the questions, alike.
Hypothetical question (and answers are FICTIONAL): Why do MCUs need clocks, such as 48MHz ones ?
The intermediate user, can give a nice explanation of how baud rates need to be generated, how interrupt timing occur, and other practicalities.
A beginner themselves, can say they had the same query, and can recommend this very good internet link about it. Link supplied.
A top expert can say, well actually computers didn't always need to have clocks. There are asynchronous ways of implementing the central processing unit. But such designs rapidly became unpopular, and were soon mostly abandoned. Except for some very rare memory access systems, which benefited from the lack of need to have fixed access times.
So, the various levels of expertise, from total beginner (answering the question with links they found useful, and helpful youtube videos on the subject area), intermediate people chiming in, and the odd real top expert here and there. Can make an interesting, education and useful answer. Perhaps spanning a few forum pages.
Turning this forum into some kind of 'expert' only (for the best answers), or voting for the best answers, doesn't seem like a good idea to me. There have been some very interesting threads, created here in the past. I'm convinced, changing the personality of the forum, may change all that.
On the other hand. Sometimes new concepts do need to be at least tried out. Otherwise, this forum would still be (exaggerated fictional statement follow, for dramatic effect) text only, using a 110 baud dial-up, clip on phone handset modem unit, on a computer from the 1980s.
T3sl4co1l:
Going back to the notion of making things slightly (subtly?) more difficult --
What if the "thank" function were harder to use? More information could be attached to it, for example:
"You wish to Thank this post. What did you like about it?"
Funny
Polite
Insightful
Technical
Well explained
etc.
Maybe even adding traditional 1-5 scores or something.
Those data wouldn't necessarily even need to be used anywhere, the point being just to give the thanker something to think about before clicking the button. Obviously there's nothing forcing that to be the case every time -- but in the average case, people do tend to do what the thing says.
And so, it's no longer just a throwaway action, it at the very least demands enough attention to click through these things, and it can be that the answer is only accepted once enough options have been filled out. Even if one clicks through mindlessly, that can be correlated against e.g. per-user stats (low-value thankers get in a habit of ticking all 5's or what have you?), per-post or thread stats (is a post/thread just consistently bad -- in constructive ways? or is it being brigaded? Or, conversely, is a post/thread consistently good and perhaps worthy of automatic labeling as such?), and this provides a statistical mechanism to infer experts: those that are frequently reviewed, positively, in technical subjects (it could further be clustered by topic), by users that frequently give quality (high entropy?) reviews. Thus, the scientific method of consensus, but formalized algorithmically, independent of users' egos (hopefully).
Obvious downside: someone has to add those columns to the database, and write and run the evaluation. (Which might run incrementally per post, or be totalized periodically, and whatever cache awareness / synchronicity has to go with that, etc.) So, unless someone's already written a plugin to this effect, doubt it's going to happen here. And the value functions aren't the most obvious, and would require testing many variations to arrive at the most useful stats.
And then, Idunno, if it ends up written as an SMF plugin kind of thing, could that be sold in turn as a package to other customers? Maybe there's a value proposition in there. Maybe the value isn't anywhere close to what is needed to justify that amount of work (some months of development at least, I would guess?).
As for honest indicators, real financial barriers tend to be representative. Something of the neoliberal dream, put your money where your mouth is, quite literally. This might resemble for example Reddit's awards system. Which is generally not very highly rated as I understand it; but clearly, not so poorly that people don't use it. And, again, whatever financial liabilities the site would have to undertake to manage that. Maybe there are ways that e.g. Paypal can streamline such interactions, maybe there's just too much work to do (including international transactions!) that it's only ever feasible for the biggest players (i.e. Reddit themselves).
Tim
MK14:
"You wish to Thank this post. What did you like about it?"
Funny 1/5
Polite 4/5
Insightful 5/5
Technical 3/5
Well explained 5/5
etc. -2/5
See post above.
EDIT: Sorry. But I think it would be a real pain to fill out information like that, for every 'thank' issued.
The fact you just have to spend a couple of seconds to just click it, makes it VERY convenient.
It's just that a few members here click the thank button way too frequently.
(I'm trying to NOT overuse the thank button, but do seem to supply quite a few).
For example, ebay have quite a few fields like above, to fill out, for sellers you have just dealt with. It is a bit of a chore to fill it all out. Having the same chore, just for other peoples forums posts, seems like a bind to me, even if you liked and want to thank their post.
rstofer:
--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on February 17, 2022, 03:49:38 pm ---Going back to the notion of making things slightly (subtly?) more difficult --
What if the "thank" function were harder to use? More information could be attached to it, for example:
"You wish to Thank this post. What did you like about it?"
Funny
Polite
Insightful
Technical
Well explained
etc.
Maybe even adding traditional 1-5 scores or something.
--- End quote ---
And now you have placed quite a burden on someone who just wants to thank someone. Now they have to score it, mentally justify it or, more likely, walk away. Somebody better keep a tally of the 'Entire Board Thanks Per Day' over time. I'll bet it goes way down!
No, I'm not a fan! Probably because I have no particular skills and stand in awe of those who do but nevertheless...
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