paintseagull
pink wingull
@ jas -- Birkal conceeded the point about the "social effort" of discouraging campaigning. Aside from the additional complication of the rule being unclear and disqualification being on the table, a "social effort" is exactly what was behind people changing their votes and being aggressive towards Yilx when they saw he has campaigned on his DA. This is a worst case scenario in my opinion and I think it's a terrible idea. Not to mention the fact that I think it's just a cop-out on our part.
@ nyttyn -- I guess this is a philosophical discussion that we don't really have the luxury of having. In my opinion, what matters is the reality of how polls work, that popularity and name recognition are things that are impossible to remove as factors, and as such talking about ideals such as "the best design should always win" are irrelevant at this time (but not necessarily unimportant in general). In a case like this where personal opinions are split, it seems best to me that we choose a neutral stance and neutral language.
@ Bull of Heaven --
That brings me to something else. All the hypotheticals that are being spoken of are assuming that allowing this will bring some sort of plague of twitter followers onto us from some crazy internet celebrity and that suddenly we will have no chance to ever win a poll again. If this actually happened we would of course have to do something about it but I REALLY don't think that's gonna be the case. But the thing that I am trying to prevent is a thing that has already happened -- a user was attacked unfairly and unreasonably. This is exactly why we need to be *CLEAR* and *STRAIGHTFORWARD* with our rules and our OPs, so 6-hour mini-mod marathons don't happen out of the blue before actual mods can deal with it. All I want out of this is clarity on what we think the rule should be, and we can deal with situational moderation issues later.
Sorry for posting so much guys, I don't mean to thread hog, just the opposite really, but I also wanna keep things focused.
@ nyttyn -- I guess this is a philosophical discussion that we don't really have the luxury of having. In my opinion, what matters is the reality of how polls work, that popularity and name recognition are things that are impossible to remove as factors, and as such talking about ideals such as "the best design should always win" are irrelevant at this time (but not necessarily unimportant in general). In a case like this where personal opinions are split, it seems best to me that we choose a neutral stance and neutral language.
@ Bull of Heaven --
In the above proposal we attempted to find the most neutral language we could for this exact reason -- I'd be happy to brainstorm better wording for it.I don't love the idea of mentioning campaigning in the OP at all, because any message can be read as either an endorsement of it or a justification to attack those that do it.
This is an excellent point and actually I'd say that this is something that we already do. I do not think that campaigning would be detrimental to our art polls because the nature of the "advertisement" that is currently done is in this vein.So where am I going with that? Instead of trying to build a community that frowns on campaigning, which reads like a fertile breeding ground for hostility, I think we should put a more positive spin on it by emphasizing the collaborative nature of CAP, and its greater importance over any personal competition. How we do that, aside from the open discussion of submissions that we already have, and greater participation therein from people like me, is a more challenging question, and one that I hope you can all help with.
That brings me to something else. All the hypotheticals that are being spoken of are assuming that allowing this will bring some sort of plague of twitter followers onto us from some crazy internet celebrity and that suddenly we will have no chance to ever win a poll again. If this actually happened we would of course have to do something about it but I REALLY don't think that's gonna be the case. But the thing that I am trying to prevent is a thing that has already happened -- a user was attacked unfairly and unreasonably. This is exactly why we need to be *CLEAR* and *STRAIGHTFORWARD* with our rules and our OPs, so 6-hour mini-mod marathons don't happen out of the blue before actual mods can deal with it. All I want out of this is clarity on what we think the rule should be, and we can deal with situational moderation issues later.
Sorry for posting so much guys, I don't mean to thread hog, just the opposite really, but I also wanna keep things focused.