Re: A GS democracy?
I dont buy this democracy Yoke ... Am all up for KHILA'Faat :D
Re: A GS democracy?
app bhi na gn 
Re: A GS democracy?
X2- what did you extract so far after hearing various view points?
I am keeping my opinions to myself because I do not want them to tilt the discussion in any way. The points I have noted so far are not my opinions but just ideas from diff sources
Re: A GS democracy?
:)
....and it is obvious that the points you have noted so far are not your opinion cuz they are just ideas from different sources.
Re: A GS democracy?
If you want something to work over a long term, survive generational transition and still retain at least some of the original spirit and character there are only two known methods, of which one is not not possible in this yuga (namely Sri Rama Rajya).
So the only practical and possible solution is capitalism. Sell stock to members but limit the max holdings to a small number. You've also solved the $ problem in the process.
You guys have done a pretty good thing here, so I'm sur emany wouldn't mind if you take take a cut of the IPO.
Finally, do reserve a chunk for school kiddos to give away free based on grades or something
You can do the initial valuation based on number of steady members.
So how does transition work? Class A shareholders stand for elections; all vote. Class A = some minimum tenure
Also remember, the cost of ops will double or even triple when this system takes over, given the process (as opposed to one or two of you making a phone call to take decisions now). Plus idea people like me cost money
PS- do have differential pricing based on per capita income of country where the member normally resides
Re: A GS democracy?
GS is not technologically special. It is not something that wont be replaced if one day it stops functioning. There are tons of vBulletin/joomla/drupal powered sites built by Pakistanies, and thanks to the ease of building these sites now, there are going to be tons more.
What does help GS is that it has a good market share, being an early adopter. Good people, and good management of those resources. A major change in environment may result in losing that, and then I am afraid there is nothing to keep GS from becoming one other vbulletin enabled pakistani forum.
on a different note, ideally i wouldve liked some sort of automatic way of moderating the forums minimizing to the extent possible any need for moderators. it eliminates almost guaranteed issues of bias and politics with humans. technology is the approach being taken by companies like google and youtube not an archaic, heirarchical system of power over which petty people consistently bicker. ideas like:
- bots that parse the pages and find obvious curse words catering for common tactics like abbreviations and misspellings
- bots with a rule base for detecting when a slanging war is occurring. I dont think this is a very difficult machine learning problem.
- bots with a document categorization algorithm to detect when something is off-topic.
^ Actually related ideas are discussed here
I made some headway writing an auto-mod but it got put on the backburner.
Re: A GS democracy?
Excellent post with some thought provoking concepts.
I too will plead the fifth and hold back my opinion, for now.
It's close to 1:45 am and I`m here reading this.........
People, I`m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!
Re: A GS democracy?
Welcome back Muzna
1:45 AM ? subha kaam pai nahi jaanaa?
Re: A GS democracy?
ravage
bots have their limitations, azkar and I used bots as far back as 1995 on chatrooms with an evergrowing list of curse words. of courdse ppl who were saying brandy would get kicked, and there is no way you would be able to talk baseball and mention fukudome.
we currently do have screening for cursewords going on, but that gets a little crazy, try saying b r an d i s h i n g.
off topic is an even tougher thing with urdu english mix algorithm will be based on key words and i can game it very easily by throwing in key words at the end while talking about mickey mouse in a thread about WTO
not to say these topics are not worth looking into.
btw it was not our being earl adaptors that just helped, but we ran a good site, and we run a good site. there were other sites, some that tried to compete head to head with us and are now gone, either due to lack of bench strength and passing teh baton, or fights between the leadership. Muzna can attest to that, she saw the implosion just as I did.
This is why the thred is even here..those sites suffered when original founders did not have time, left it to people who destroyed it all, or the successors fought and split up stuff. I dont want to see that happen here. None of us do.
Re: A GS democracy?
true X2, the issue of gaming is there. However that is a factor taken into consideration when designing algorithms. State of the art has evolved considerably in text classification and understanding. For example neither br andishing nor fukudome would confuse a modern language processor, they are design to read words phonetically just as you or i read words.
Likewise true you could defeat the algorithm if you wanted, but that is assuming mods arent similarly gamed. Text categorization is very good these days, take a look at google news for an idea of what I am talking about. Obviously there are also things like this, which would probably defeat a bot since it’s fake papers got accepted into an actual conference.
Point is though with technology like this you can reduce the number of people in a position of responsibility who need to monitor and engage with posters, at the same time giving regular posters a greater responsibility and sense of trust. Wikipedia uses a small panel of super-users to manage a hugge repository. A lot of that is managed through technology, you would never even know who the “mods” are there or if they themselves have a bias.
Im not saying remove the human element entirely, what I am saying is that industry leaders are using technology to trend towards more invisible, low footprint moderation.
Re: A GS democracy?
An interesting example is the very popular forum slashdot.org. While they dont have a bot moderating the forums, they have a system that takes in moderations from posters and does analysis on those rankings and the rankers and builds a pool of “good” mods, sort of managed distributed moderation.
http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/chi04/LampeResnick.pdf
Re: A GS democracy?
no one is talking frequent changes, but regular changes. rotate ppl around, move em out, move em in. etc.
Butthanks for noting that if it aint broke dont fix it. as we discuss in this thread more and more people are saying that the curent structure and approach works. Thats a good endorsement :)
Frequent and regular mean the same thing to me. Change is constant in the long run and on the whole but it needs to be irregular when you look at the individual parts as one does not know what will 'break' in advance so there is unpredictability of change. I am not saying that it ain't broke, but to not fix something that ain't broke. I think you and other admins. need to decide what is broke and what isn't. Users can give you their opinions but the decision rests with the admin.
I personally do think on the whole it ain't broke but some parts do require a bit of fine tuning.
Re: A GS democracy?
good points, and something we can have the techies look into.The point about giving regular posters more responsibility and sense of trust, that is part of what i am going to be observing on allviews.
Re: A GS democracy?
alright folks April is over and as noted I am closing this broad discussion now.
thanks for a spirited discussion and some good ideas
we will mull over all perspectives and later come back with one or two more specific topic threads from this discussion