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Make it look way more popular than it is. They can still behave as if they had their proper scores but add some random repeatable amount of apparent karma.

Hell if there's an easy way to run AI bot comments we should fake the comments too.

Worked for Reddit

Comment preview

No, thats a horrible idea. I like my real glow niggers over my fake white nationalists.

[-]JasonCarswell
2(+2|0)

No.

We get enough fake news. And we certainly don't need A.I. here. The hive mind will find us eventually regardless.

Alternatively and better, we could do the hard work of discussing and cultivating what we want to see in our forum's culture by encouraging and motivating that behaviour.

@LarrySwinger had the right idea with a meh idea a week or few ago. The idea was right to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks - but the idea to @ everyone all the time was meh.

@x0x7 has tried many times to throw out questions to folks. This is the right approach. IMO the ideas were too general or bland to get engagement. If you get too edgy or too specific you won't find interest either. It requires creative balance, and even that's not a guarantee if you have bad timing, low participation, or other factors.

Here's another pseudo-sneaky idea: Folks could make different aliases to use logged in in different browsers to post more content. Eventually with a bigger userbase those aliases can be retired and x0x7 can merge them in to the preferred single alias of your choosing. Besides the major problem of trickery, another problem among many with this is that it doesn't improve the sparse authentic comments.

Speaking of comments, you won't ever be able to stumble upon them all if you tried. I'd love to see a list of just "New Comments", distinct from the post and sub feeds. When I joined SaidIt in 2018 I just couldn't keep up with all the comments even then, and didn't try. I bet I could keep up here and would appreciate it - until we grow enough to be overwhelming, a good problem to have.

A last thought about voting is that it's simply boring, same as everywhere else. To stand out you could change the icons to suit your fancy, but that's still not radical. You could have the positive, negative, and sum so folks could see the ratio score, but our numbers are so low it makes little difference now. You could code an array on a 5x5 grid for my MetaVoteā„¢ idea that includes 4 extreme feelings in the corners and varying intensities in the rest. Or we could come up with other more interesting creative ways to engage folks and promote votes and engagement.

Inauthenticity may have "worked for Reddit" but it's a trap for humanity and everyone loses when they only use the Top-10 centralizing social media platforms.

Once you lie, you can't undo that.

Once a murderer, always a murderer.

[-]LarrySwinger
1(+1|0)

One way to make this site look more active without lying is to have Anonymous as the default alias, and then people can tick a box that makes them use their own username.

[-]JasonCarswell
1(+1|0)

I applaud that you're trying to think outside the box, with yet another box, but still don't like the deception. And worse, folks might start posting all kinds of shit "anonymously".

IMO, we need to cultivate a culture of engagement and participation. How? I don't yet know. And whatever authentic lessons we learn here, hopefully can be conveyed to RabbitHole and LeverMind and beyond.

[-]Brad2(+2|0)

True, true. That could really crank up the engagement, I guess. But think about it, man, where's the real connection in that? Authenticity's where it's at

[-]LarrySwinger
1(+1|0)

/c/ideas4matrix

[-]x0x7
1(+1|0)

I'd agree with you but I don't like being fake especially if I don't have to. In theory we have enough users here now that we shouldn't have a wall of 1s.

Plus it might be worth solving the question.. how do we incentivize people so that they feel like voting is in their interest?

Sometimes I come in and vote most of everything up myself. If I had one more person doing that it wouldn't look dead. I guess you don't want a wall of 3s either. So that's a note. If you do a mass upvote, intentionally miss a few that you don't think are great contributions.

[-]JasonCarswell
1(+1|0)

You can see in my CSS on SaidIt, below the (shitty) "search" and above the "Submit a new link post" button is a speech bubble. I can't tell you how many times I asked magnora7 and d3rr how to be able to add a few lines of text with links there. By leading by example, the point was for admins and/or mods to have messages, short info, or links to important info, temporary and/or ever-present. There were few or no good bulleting boards options there. At best they had a very limited footer, and it was like pulling teeth to get M7 to add the wiki FAQ there.

I recommend adding a little bulleting box on this forum, even if it only has three short links to other posts/pages.

Expanding on that original idea, you could have randomized displays in that small bulletin box. Randomly these might pop up: tip of the day, word of the day, quote of the day, FAQ, site developments, site goals, image of the day, meme of the day, top post of the day, top post of the week, top post from 1 year ago, etc.

And of course, the idea that made me arrive at the above...

To incentivize engagement and participation I could animate a little flashy GIF or APNG for a banner - or bulletin box. It could be as simple as stroboscopic variations in different type faces of "VOTE!", or it could do that with pauses to explain why it's important, or we could just skip the strobes. Like an advertisement (my former career), but it's a PSA or Public Service Announcement (I worked on those too - and do so now but for freedom stuff). And we could make other PSAs on other issues. For example, promote Movie Nights, new forum features, etc.

FYI, I vote on almost everything, as you've noticed, but never blindly.

[-]dwb1(+1|0)

it seems to come regardless. i have reason to believe this has been happening to talklol for awhile now.

[-]LarrySwinger
1(+1|0)

That's solved by branding. If you emphasise the positional nature of posts and how you get more of what you like simply by voting, more people would do it. Perhaps a PM upon registration that contains a user guide explaining it all would do.

[-]JasonCarswell
1(+1|0)

Why a PM? Put it in a FAQ on a wiki-page. And don't let folks forget the FAQ.

[-]LarrySwinger
1(+1|0)

An initial PM upon registering, like on le reddit and other sites, is more visible than an entry in a FAQ that people won't even read.

[-]JasonCarswell
1(+1|0)

Really it depends on the user. Good FAQs are useful. Poor FAQs are annoying.

Best: both.

[-]AmericanMuskrat0(+0|0)

Also the default feed for new users looks awful,should be 0, 5, 5, 5 imo.