notes-group-old-myDiscussionForumCommunityGuidelines170213

old stuff

NOTE: i love the way reddit expands the details of rules on this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20150710230652/https://www.reddit.com/rules/

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle

Things against the rules:

• Politics (including any attempt to promote collective action, to criticize or promote a group of people or their leaders or candidates, or to educate readers about something they 'should' know but may not wish to spend time reading about right now) or religion, very off-topic posts
• Except in the agree/disagree dimension, do not downvote unless you have a (quasi)-objective reason (which must be stated). (by the "quasi" in quasi-objective, we mean that things such as pornography, which can be widely and non-controversially agreed upon in most if not all cases and for which an algorithm cannot be produced, is objective enough for these purposes -- note that if the mods disagree with your stated reason then it will be taken to have failed the test of being sufficiently non-controversial to be quasi-objective)

Governance

Classes of users, and what they mean:

• New user: anyone with an account
• Guest: their initial post was validated by a Moderator
• Frequent Contributor: at least 3 contributions, upvoted by at least 3 different members (if there are 3 different active members), spanning at least 3 months, and (incoming Merit over the last 3 months is at or above the 50% percentile of all active non-Member Frequent Contributor accounts, and total Merit is at or above the 50% percentile of all accounts with any Merit; OR invitation)
• Member: by invitation only; can vote on posts, elections, and proposals; can view Hidden posts. Full title: 'frequent contributor and invited member'
• Steward: by invitation only; can vote on changes to Member rolls, bylaw amendments, ratification of non-consensus reallocations of power between Custodians. Full title: 'frequent contributor and invited member steward'
• Moderator ("Mod"): by election by the Boardmembers. Can Disemvowel, Hide, or Delete posts; can Warn, Disemvowel, Ban, or place in Bad Standing a person. Also clarifies Policies, and protects the rights of Members.
• Admin: Administers the software running the site.
• Chair: preserves the rights of the Members
• Custodian: have a special role in the voting system which allocates Influence among Members. Full title: 'frequent contributor and invited member steward and custodian'
• Boardmembers: elected by Members; vote on Proposals; choose the CEO
• CEO: elected by Boardmembers; manages the site

Frequent Contributor status is divided into Active, Inactive, Emeritus. To stay Active, an account's incoming Merit must be more than the 50% percentile of all active Guest accounts over the past 3 months (an inactive Guest account is one which has not made a Merit-receiving contribution in the last 3 months). An account becomes Emeritus when it is placed there manually, or when it has been in Inactive status for 3 months and has not made a Merit-receiving contribution in that time. An Inactive or Emeritus account can become Active again by meeting the requirements for Active.

Frequent Contributors who don't want to participate in the Merit system may opt-out of it. Merit opt-outs (what do we call them? not volunteers, because everyone's a volunteer. Monks? Saints? Mb 'Altruist' or 'Egoless' or 'Humble' or 'Modest'; i guess Modest is best, although maybe just 'Merit opt-out' is clearer) don't accrue Merit and are neither Active nor Inactive nor Emeritus. They may still be invited to Membership, etc (although it may be harder for them to get noticed).

Frequent Contributors are listed on a project-wide Contributors page. Other contributors are only listed (possibly upon request) in the release/thread/post/page to which they contributed.

todo

(by "be professional" is meant: (a) if something would be inappropriate at work, it's probably inappropriate here (b) strive to prevent personal issues from disrupting discussion) focus on the issue, not the person

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if you actually gave Merit to posts and comments and ranked them by that, you'd have trouble b/c long afterwards, ppl might reclaim the Merit they gave so that they could use it for something else. In the extreme, all comments on old posts might become unranked over time. We need to deal with old posts.

One idea is to give Merit to people, not posts/comments. This would still have a similar problem, as old users leave and are eventually forgotten and their Merit decays, but not as fast, and it might not decay to zero in all cases.

Another idea is to have a separate amount of voting weight which is depleted on a per-story basis. If you give a lot of upvotes on comments of one story ('post'), does that mean that your upvotes on other stories should have less weight? If not, then this is good. Still have a problem with voting on posts, though.

Another idea is to track the integral over time of the score of a comment, rather than just its current score.

Also, what about clone-independence? I'm not sure if we want clone-independence here but if we do then we need to think of upvotes only as voting, and not as Merit.

I guess upvotes should be weighted by the Merit (not Influence) of the voter.

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idea for heightened requirement for Frequent Contributors (integrated into the above):

all of:

• at least 3 contributions, each of which were upvoted by at least 3 different Members (if individual contributions are not tracked, then at least 9 gifts of merit from at least 3 different Members)
• spanning at least 3 months
• total Merit is in the top half of all accounts
• incoming Merit over the last 3 months is in the top half of all active Regular Contributor accounts

Once achieved, Frequent Contributor status does not automatically go away (but it can be taken away). But it does transition from Active into Inactive status when, in the last three months, your incoming Merit is not more than the 50% percentile of all active non-Regular Contributor accounts (active non-Regular Contributor accounts are ones which have made a Merit-receiving contribution in the last 3 months). It goes into Emeritus when you place it there manually, or when it has been in Inactive status for 3 months and you have not made any Merit-receiving contributions during that time.

this might be too hard or too easy but we'll see.

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in an open source project, could feature only Frequent Contributors (divided into Active, Inactive, and Emeritus) in the project-wide Contributors list (irregular contributors could still be featured in release notes, however).

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i think we should call it 'frequent contributor' in order to make it clearer to outsiders what this means.

also, if Merit factors into the determination of active/inactive, and if ppl can be 'volunteers' to opt-out of the Merit system, then we can't determine whether they are active or not. i guess 'volunteers' are neither active nor inactive.

Volunteers can still be invited Members, etc.