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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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I'm opposed to hiding scores.

Rather than rehashing arguments on either side, I'd like to ask, how will the decision over whether to keep this change be made?

I've previously registered a prediction that hiding scores will ultimately reduce quantifiable site engagement without a commensurate rise in quality (whatever the consensus definition for quality may be). I know I will be less keen to read content here if I cannot selectively consume higher-quality (per upvotes) content and skip over the lower-quality ones. There is already too much information online to treat every post as equal under some kind of egalitarian guise. Hiding votes permanently also makes the entire system less robust--what's to stop trolls from posting GPT created content that barely does not explicitly break rules but still waste readers' time?

Does the site admin have access to data that might inform a good decision other than gauging the sentiments of a dozen people who reply to this parent comment, and, ironically perhaps, the upvote/downvote ratios of the dozen replies?

Hiding votes permanently also makes the entire system less robust--what's to stop trolls from posting GPT created content that barely does not explicitly break rules but still waste readers' time?

In the future we'll come here for the GPT posts alone. They'll have greater erudition, insight, and upvotes.

We do have data about comments per day etc. See www.themotte.org/stats, www.themotte.org/daily_chart, and www.themotte.org/weekly_chart.

Actually the daily and weekly charts aren't working right now for some reason but they normally do.

Daily chart and Weekly chart are throwing 500 errors at me, but I hadn't seen the stats page yet. Thanks for linking it.

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