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r/ideasforcmv•
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IDEA: Limit Posting of CMVs to People Who Have Already Earned a Delta

I've noticed that the chance of poor threads is much higher from accounts that have never earned a delta. These threads are more likely to devolve into Rule B, or be removed for Rule E, or just be deleted by the OP when things don't go their way.

I propose, like Stack Overflow, that posting be limited to accounts that have already earned at least one delta in discussion. I think this better prepares posters for what to expect and how to act.

Posted Aug 16, 2018, 1:29 AM UTC

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Grunt08Mod•

I think we'd be shutting down a fair number of decent posts and inviting some serious delta abuse from dedicated soapboxers.

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cacheflowOP•

Its not hard to acquire a delta while acting in good faith, so I don't see it as shutting down decent posts, at best delaying them for a day or two while they get their feet wet in the community. I think overall, it would lead to a higher level of discourse.

I don't really see where the serious delta abuse would come in, can you elaborate?

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Grunt08Mod•

  1. If I'm on the fence about posting - maybe I'm new to Reddit, maybe I'm worried about the reaction, whatever - that particular barrier to entry might be a huge turn-off.

  2. If someone really wants to post and has no inherent respect for the rules and community, there are ample opportunities for self-dealing through alts. We have no existing incentive for that, and we'd be creating one here. It might not happen, but we don't have the tools or procedures to fight it if it did.

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cacheflowOP•
  1. It might, but we've got a massive community here and its growing quite well, its growth and volume still a primary goal?
  2. DeltaBot has a database of all deltas awarded, and who awarded them. I think it would be pretty easy to detect this type of self dealing, simply by looking at the database.
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Grunt08Mod•

  1. I'm not concerned about growth. I'm thinking about an individual, good-faith poster who would be turned off by that bar.

  2. I'm skeptical of that.

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DocCannery84•

Terrible idea. What if I use cmv as a lurker only? Or I like to be involved in discussion when I'm not working hard to get that delta? What if I often ass to the discussion with attempts to cmv but don't get the delta?

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cacheflowOP•

If you lurk only, you aren't posting, I don't see the issue.

I'm not saying to bar people from reading or commenting, merely from posting a top level question until they have some history in the community. We could track activity in another way, but deltas seem to be a good proxy for decent involvement.

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DocCannery84•

So if I lurk for years and suddenly have a cmv I want discussed, know exactly how to do it properly from all my reading, I'm not good enough to post?

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cacheflowOP•

I'm not making value judgement about people, so whether someone is "good enough" isn't my goal.

I'm proposing a method to raise discourse. If you've lurked for years and never participated,I propose it might be better to start by replying to a few existing threads before jumping headlong into a top level post .

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DocCannery84•

Sure, but as I said, replying does not guarantee a delta in any way. I've certainly replied way more than I've been delta'd.

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etquodMod•

This probably would improve post quality overall, but I think the far more significant effect would be the reduction of post quantity. I don't think a marginal increase in the average level of the posts is worth a dramatic decrease in the subreddit's activity.

CMV gets what, fewer than 50 posts a day as it is? Less on Fridays. And we'd be cutting out a huge proportion of potential submitters, most of whom I doubt would make the effort to learn the system with this barrier in place.

We'd also likely kill many collaborations with schools, researchers, journalists etc. trying to do projects involving CMV posts, which have generated a fair amount of publicity/prestige for the sub in the past.

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cacheflowOP•

We'd also likely kill many collaborations with schools, researchers, journalists etc. trying to do projects involving CMV posts, which have generated a fair amount of publicity/prestige for the sub in the past.

When I was modding, we had to manually approve all the collaborations with schools anyway, since those accounts didn't meet the karma and account age thresholds anyway, so we wouldn't be killing these collaborations at all, nothing would change on that front.

Similarly, if you wanted to run an experiment with researchers, nothing would prevent the mod team from doing so. Either by manually approving the post, or awarding the account an "honorary delta" if you wanted it to be done in a more incognito fashion.

Also, I'm willing to trade lower quantity for better quality. Most of the best subreddits (AskHistorians for example) have very high bars for quality, at the expense of quantity.

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etquodMod•

This is a fairly small aspect of my opposition to the idea, but we've justified allowing many/most of these projects - despite concerns about creating the appearance of ideological bias - by rigorously (and flatly) holding everyone who posts on CMV to the same standard. I'd be reluctant to move away from that all-purpose principle and put us in the position of having to make a lot of more difficult ad hoc decisions about each use case as it comes up.

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cacheflowOP•

Its still a universal standard, I don't see where the appearance of an ideological bias comes from? Can you clarify?

We'd still be holding everyone to the same standard. We'd just have a way of new members joining, by first commenting, and then leading a discussion.

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etquodMod•

I'm saying in the specific context of "project"-type posts - currently our position, if Wired or the National University of Singapore or Fox News or whoever sends us a message saying "hey we want to use CMV for [whatever]", our response is always: "we don't endorse this, but you're welcome to post here as long as you follow the rules". But your scheme presents a more substantial barrier to entry for that kind of one-off stuff than currently exists, so now we have to say either: "sorry MIT, go earn some deltas first" or develop some new system that relaxes the standard for the kinds of projects we benefit from, which requires us to define and limit those, which is where we become fascist shills.

The throwaway screening isn't a comparable barrier imo. That's a formality if the rules are followed. This would be a demand for a much higher level of effort and engagement; it makes our forum substantially less open.

On a basic level I'm not with you here because I think one of CMV's biggest flaws is that it's currently too hard to post there successfully, not too easy. I'd rather consider ways to get more people participating - even to some extent at the expense of the level of conversation - than anything that would make the process even more restrictive than it already is.

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