By the pricking of my thumbs…

Inside me lives a crusader, an inquisitor, a stalker and a harpy. There’s a mad despot in there sharing space with a moist-eyed idealist.

You don’t want to give me any power.

Oh, I’d be okay sometimes. I might be a good fray-steward part of the week, but on Thursdays I’d morph into a sadistic teenager while you’re all out for lunch. Or I’d compliantly follow my pack into a wasteland of social engineering, only to look up one day to discover we’d eliminated everyone but ourselves and the most persistent of idiots.

And I’ll always work things to my own benefit. Always.

Trust me.

The great thing about the Fray is that it’s not regulated by users like me, and the value of posts is not determined by those who have collected the most points or who belong to the biggest posse, but by those who make the best arguments.

In advance of the fray-redesign, there was discussion of various ways to apply user ratings in order to allow each of us a customizable view. How do you feel about the fray adopting this kind of feature now, having experienced first hand the effects of the Truster User system at dkos, where users have the means to up or down-rate posts regardless of their merit, giving them power to exclude posts and posters based on their own personal tastes, and that of their friends?

And now that you've been blogging awhile, what other features would you like to see?

(You do realize that without a quick toggle with which to flag worthy and unworthy posts, all we’ll have in our arsenal is words. Are words enough?)

…something wicked this way comes.

Word.

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Excerpts:

MsZilla reconsiders the wisdom of user-ratings systems.

Geoff responds: If it's merely power to assign scores in tandem with a voluntary choice to heed scores or not... Doesn't seem like it should have the same impact.

MsZ: Yes, it does . . . A group of people can still downcheck something to a level no sane person would ever want to open it . . . If you make it so everyone can do it, all you've done is made sure everyone on the site can exercise group summary judgement.

Geoff: I really do feel that we owe it to readers to make a configurable viewing experience that helps people with varying amounts of time to kill navigate the site efficiently.

On an earlier thread, MsZ’s diagnostic: Other than the technological flaws, the "problems" everyone keeps blathering about with the Fray are PEBKAC. The problems exist between the keyboard and the chair.
. . .
You can hang bells and whistles off this place until it looks like a bloody Christmas tree. They'll keep asking because if you do that then they can blame the site. There is no amount of code that will fix the core problem. Each improvement is just another opportunity to find a new and improved way to act like jerks to each other.

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