Attn Baron: upgrade your software to allow for self moderation of threads!

Having these morons trashing good threads is annoying, to be sure, but unfortunately, self-moderation isn't the way to solve it. Competent, objective moderation is the way to solve it. Baron has shown that he's not really committed to that, most likely because he can best monetize the site by letting it run the way it is. Baron knows his business and he's optimizing it.

Self moderation isn't good because there are plenty of people who are full of shit and others need to be able to point it out. Just take the best example from this site - who is the most hated member here? Now imagine what it would have been like if we hadn't been able to call him out on his BS? More generally, if we make a virtue of free speech, self moderation can never work.

Everyone knows that the site has gone downhill in the past few years, but until someone steps up and starts a for-pay site (which I would gladly join) we have no choice but to put up with it.

 

I find it amusing that when someone starts a Feedback thread saying, "Baron, this site is amazing!" => He will reply back to the thread in less than 2 hours without fail.

However, if someone actually has constructive feedback to improve his site, he will either ignore them entirely, or tell them he's "looking into it", and never respond further.

Similarly, when someone starts a Feedback thread to ask why XXXXX was allowed to attack YYYYYY, with the thread subsequently moved to chit chat. => Baron will casually reply "You should have used the complaint feature, and we would have taken care of it."

Unfortunately, when you use the complaint feature, the complaint gets ignored and still nothing gets done.

This site has an increasing number of problems which make it less useful for the ET community. Sadly, I think Baron's heart is no longer in the business and the site is suffering as a result.

 

Again, I think this is 100% wrong. Baron sees the numbers and understands what drives his business. He is trying to monetize site traffic and is doing whatever he needs to do to accomplish that goal. He's not here to make sure that the site conforms to your idea of what would be ideal, or mine. He's not interested in making sure that the content is the 'best' that it can be. The 'best' that it can be is whatever allows him to make the most money from it. It's overwhelmingly likely that in this, as in almost all things, high quality content does not pay as well as lowest common denominator content.

 

At the same time uninformed drivel that creeps up in a thread and then spews out of control by said poster and totally ruins an informative and useful thread.

SI has used self moderated threads for years. It does work. Now you've implied that SI is a ghost of what it used to be. Yep, it has declined. But at the same time there are still some great threads there where traders (and posters) who show some level of maturity can discuss matters in an intelligent and respectful manner.

ET has drifted much closer to Yahoo type threads due to the riff raff that is allowed to post without any consequences for their irresponsible posts.

 

i also want to moderate my threads

please

 

Baron is only interested in the masses of newbies. They are the sheep who flock in numbers to the site and keep it well greased. Baron does not care about sophisticated traders like you EricP and he does not care about quality content.

B. Rowshan was banned after this thread, and i'm sure i'll be banned too for writing this post. Of course, first the attack monkeys will stomp on me ie r raskilinov and ivanovich who both blindly support anything Baron says.

Bottom line, this site is all about fleecing newbies. As long as the newbies flock, Baron will change nothing.

 

Easy to dismiss out of hand now, I see. However, after Dustin said he also supported some form of self moderation (in the thread, above, and AFTER your response on page 1), you immediated replied with the following:

So, which is it? A bad idea, or a good idea in 'some form', but difficult to implement since it's not part of the typical off-the-shelf message board software (which is a perfectly fine response)? You said you'd 'look into it' on 7/13/09. I politely asked a followup question ~4+ months later, but it was ignored.

I don't think I was out of line by asking what, if anything, you found from 'looking into it'. Sure sounded like it was something you were considering.

Now, it sounds like something that you had already dismissed out of hand. Many of us are honestly interested in the quality of your site, and try to add value to your site. You don't do them justice by making commitments to them, then subsequently dismissing them as you have. Feel free to permanently ban me, if you think my presence damages the value of your site.

P.S. The poll results on this issue was clear on the preference of your members here on ET.

 

The traffic of Silicon Investor has declined dramatically after several changes in ownership. But, it's crazy to imply that self moderation is somehow related to its decline.

Silicon Investor was also sold by its founders (the Dryer brothers) for over $33 million. Not such a bad business model to follow, IMO. Note that this was in early 1998, two years before the peak of the wild internet mania bubble.

As I have said before on this thread, though, if Baron believes that in the long run, flame wars will result in more advertising revenue than increased content => then the right decision would be to encourage the continuation of such flaming. It's a straight-forward business decision.

 

This is how you can moderate your own thread today