Related thought: I haven’t had a chance to look closely at this yet, but it appears to be the nth proposal for something like this I’ve seen on the EA forum. This might also represent a failure of the “newsfeed of posts sorted by date” model.
What if there was a box to check for “this is a proposal”, and then once that box was checked, we got “bump” style forum mechanics where every time someone left a comment, the post went back to the top of the front page? That way a proposal could stay on the front page long enough for details to get hashed out & eventually the proposal might actually get implemented.
Proposals could also sort comments by “new” by default, so you could write a comment summarizing all of the discussion so far & suggesting a way to synthesize it, and that comment would be the first comment to get displayed. Perhaps there could also be something to nudge the user towards reading most or all of the comments in a proposal thread before leaving a comment of their own?
(Are there other categories of posts that would benefit from additional time on the front page? BTW, another advantage of the bumping mechanic is it makes it easier to have an influence on the discussion even if you only check the forum occasionally. Which is likely going to be true for important people who have a lot of other responsibilities.)
Another situation where it can be valuable for a post to spend more time on the frontpage: This essay argues it’s important to have 4 layers of intellectual conversation. The number 4 seems arbitrary to me, but I agree with the overall point that back-and-forth is valuable and necessary. But if a post falls off the frontpage partway through that back-and-forth, people are less motivated to continue the back-and-forth because the audience is smaller.
Related thought: I haven’t had a chance to look closely at this yet, but it appears to be the nth proposal for something like this I’ve seen on the EA forum. This might also represent a failure of the “newsfeed of posts sorted by date” model.
What if there was a box to check for “this is a proposal”, and then once that box was checked, we got “bump” style forum mechanics where every time someone left a comment, the post went back to the top of the front page? That way a proposal could stay on the front page long enough for details to get hashed out & eventually the proposal might actually get implemented.
Proposals could also sort comments by “new” by default, so you could write a comment summarizing all of the discussion so far & suggesting a way to synthesize it, and that comment would be the first comment to get displayed. Perhaps there could also be something to nudge the user towards reading most or all of the comments in a proposal thread before leaving a comment of their own?
(Are there other categories of posts that would benefit from additional time on the front page? BTW, another advantage of the bumping mechanic is it makes it easier to have an influence on the discussion even if you only check the forum occasionally. Which is likely going to be true for important people who have a lot of other responsibilities.)
Another situation where it can be valuable for a post to spend more time on the frontpage: This essay argues it’s important to have 4 layers of intellectual conversation. The number 4 seems arbitrary to me, but I agree with the overall point that back-and-forth is valuable and necessary. But if a post falls off the frontpage partway through that back-and-forth, people are less motivated to continue the back-and-forth because the audience is smaller.