Member Power Rankings

July 6, 2000 2:32 PM

In the past we've discussed how to filter posts or adding "ignore" or "love" tags to certain people. The Raging Bull investment site has an interesting system for ranking users with dollar signs: Member Power Rankings
posted by daveadams to feature requests at 2:32 PM (8 comments total)

Another option would be to somehow inform other users of MeFi how users ranked particular threads. Matt's working on allowing individuals to ignore or watch certain threads or certain people. Wouldn't it be cool if it were done per thread and when you visited you could see that 100 people thought the thread was cool and 8 people chose to ignore the thread? So it would have a score of 92. You wouldn't have to move it around or anything, just show the score.
posted by daveadams at 2:34 PM on July 6, 2000

Power Rankings....Score one for Elitism.... Yeah!!!!
Why not develop a "Digital Caste System"?

Man... when someone here has the balls to let us in "steerage" know what we could have possibly done to deserve this stuff... this let me know okay?
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 3:10 PM on July 6, 2000

Why must it constitute a personal insult for people to want ways to more readily access content that's relevant or interesting to them?
posted by Sapphireblue at 3:13 PM on July 6, 2000

When people don't want to hear all sides of a discussion.....

Well, I call it "ignorance", but what the hell do I know?
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 3:15 PM on July 6, 2000

To futher elaborate (ooh... a 4-syllable word! I amaze me sometimes!)...

There's only talk of filtering people here... There's no way to filter out a post for content; you never know what they may post tomorrow that someone may find interesting....

Sometimes I find even a broken watch is right once a day.

I'm all for filtering. You can never hear from me again, and I'll never hear you guys bitching again.

But people that want to rank posters based on their so-called value in this community???

They're the first group of people I'm gonna filter out.
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 3:32 PM on July 6, 2000

well, I'd've suggested creating content categories for all posts, and letting people read only those in which they're interested, but have preferred to bogart that particular idea for myself... ;)

seriously though, what's better, letting people filter out the ones that annoy them no end, or having these stupid arguments between the same suspects break out every time? I know there are just one or two that I really do have to sit on my hands not to flame, and one of these days I'm gonna break and flame away anyway (regretting it, I'm sure, about 5 minutes after posting) and then everyone who sees that is going to roll their eyes and go "damn, but MetaFilter's gone to hell, here they go again". I'd rather just filter 'em out. Save me some heartburn, save you all from when net-rage finally gets the best of me.

and, if I can say---I see a difference between not wanting to hear all sides of a discussion, and being uninterested in *any* sides of a discussion. I've said before that I think it would be a Bad Thing to filter people's comments out as well as their posts.

the idea of ranking, specifically, leaves me lukewarm, but if it were done in such a way that it took a pretty widespread response from the community to categorize a poster as a troll (a fairly high given percentage, at which point you get troll filter on, or troll filter off?) , I think that could have some value. of course a system like that would only be as effective as people were responsible with clicking that troll-vote button when someone makes a habit of flaming, self-promotion, posting things that got posted yesterday...
posted by Sapphireblue at 8:57 PM on July 6, 2000

and one of these days I'm gonna break and flame away

Flame away sistah! It's surprisingly very therapeutic... :0)

Well wouldn't ranking topics and people sorta turn this place into Slashdot? (Which, let me go on record by saying "They suck...big time!")

Like I said.. I'm all for the "filtering-out" proposition. But ranking people by importance???? I don't know about that. (A large) Part of MetaFilter's charm is the fact that you, me, Baylink, Frayed, Ezrael and Honkzilla can all express our views on a level playing field....

Like I said in a similar thread. I value everyone's POV and opinion here, whether I agree or not. A topic doesn't grab me, I move on... no biggie. If it irks so many people *that* bad... then by all means make changes.

But I'll never accept anyone here as "better than me"... I'm kinda arrogant that way. ;0)
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 10:05 PM on July 6, 2000

i'm with ericbrooksdotcom on this one... the last thing the web needs is another site full of karmawhores. Personally, i'm confidant in my ability to read fast enough to decide if i'm wasting my time or not.
posted by katchomko at 12:07 AM on July 7, 2000