[MrWookie47]

This second post is thoughtful and looks with an eye towards the betterment of the forum. The first attempt was far too disrespectful, but I thank StellarWind for chiming in with a good response to the first. I'll take on the second, because I don't like to let well thought out posts go unanswered.

I disagree with many points you raise. To start, I'll actually take a snippet from your first post - that only 10% of my moderator actions are unnecessary. I'd estimate that about 1/4-1/3 of all my moderator actions involve dealing with spam. Those sorts of things are absolutely necessary, and I will be so bold as to suggest that everyone agrees with my reasoning for doing it (except the spammer). Now, if you want to revise your claim to say that 90% of the threads I lock were locked unnecessarily, that's fine. I'll cover that later.

Secondly, you contend that I must cater not only to the needs of those who are vocal, but also to those that aren't when I choose what threads to lock, move, delete, or whatever I do to sculpt the forum. Even if we assume that I can magically know the desires (and numbers) of these people, I disagree with you. I contend that it's only the people who post that I need to cater to. See, a forum with nothing but lurkers does not a forum make. We need posters, or else we won't even have lurkers. Thus, I consider it my job to make the experience of the posters here as good as possible, however that may be. If I accomplish that abstract goal, then I maximize the traffic here with good posts, and by doing that, I come close to maximizing the experience of the lurkers. If some leave because they don't like what I do (or don't do), their utility to this web site is minimal compared to the utility of the regular posters who freely post excellent strategy that keeps people (lurkers or other posters) coming back to read more.

The next thing I want to take on is the myth of the unopened thread. Even if a poster makes a thread with a title that is obviously something a number of people aren't interested in, a good fraction of those people are going to open it anyway. Their reasons for this vary. Some may want to mock the OP. Some open it out of boredom. Some want to just check and see if it's as bad as they think it is. All of the people in this hypothetical group would be much happier reading something else, but many will still open AND REPLY to a thread in spite of not liking it.

Now, I will anticipate your answer to that point. You may suggest, "See, these people posted and read that thread which you said had no value. Clearly that thread did indeed have some value, even to them." This is a fair criticism. However, my argument still stands. Instead of basing the value of a thread on its readership, a better means of evaluating a thread's worth is on the jollies (units of happiness) that people get from reading it. A thread that 200 people read, each getting 1 jolly out of it is inferior, in my opinion, to a thread which 100 people read and each get 10 jollies. If we don't have people getting a large number of jollies from this site, they'll get their jollies elsewhere on the internet. Consequently, if 25% of the readership of this site gets, say, 5 jollies from reading your "z" content, and the remainder all get one jolly, the forum is better of if "z" is replaced with something that gives everyone 10 jollies. It is the nature of this forum that removing some content does not leave a zero jolly void where there were jollies before (for the purposes of this argument, I'm using the front page of the forum as the "universe," or whatever). Instead, the removal of one post is instantly filled by another.

Now, not everyone has the same preferences. A bad beat post may give some segment of the forum 100 jollies each, while the remainder only get 1 or 2. This is the beauty of BBV. People in this segment can migrate to BBV and get such a jolly rush that their head explodes, and people here can read content that gives them more jollies. OTOH, if people here really did get an immense amount of jollies from beats, it'd be logical for me to adjust and allow the beats to roll in. How do I know which is which? Well, as above, I listen to those who post. And the bulk of the voices say they get more jollies from strategy than from beats.

Now, the last point I'll address is how you suggest that the forum, if left on its own, will reflect the preferences of its members. This cannot be the case. I'll lay out an approximate set of preferences for me, but I suspect they agree with a fairly large number of posters. Let's say that I get 1 jolly from the average bad beat post, 5 jollies from a 10k stats post, 25 jollies from a relatively boring hand post, 100 jollies from the average post that makes the weekly digest, and 1000 jollies from an epic strategy post (NPA's Biggest Leak, for example). Now, if these preferences, which I believe are shared (approximately) by a very large number of posters, and the posting reflected this, the front page of the forum would be filled with epic strategy posts. One doesn't have to look very hard to see this is not the case. We don't even have a huge influx of digest-worthy posts. Instead, we have some boring to decent hand posts, a few good ones, a stats post, and this. Why? Because people don't always know how to post the best material. This is a forum for learning, so we expect some basic questions as people get up to speed.

Furthermore, let's even assume that people post in a manner proportional to their skill and their preferences. I prefer the epic posts, but I'm not good enough to always post them. So I try to start threads about hands that will be digest worthy. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't. A hypothetical newer poster with the same preferences may only be good at posting standard hand posts, while Ed Miller churns out epics and doesn't even think twice about it. Another poster with a strong preference for beats post a bunch of them. However, since this poster is not in anyway forced to conform to the posting frequency of the group (reflected by their preferences), and I'm not interfering (yet), he makes his posts and gets mocked, but that doesn't change the fact that his one post frequently put a 1 jolly post (for the vocal portion of the forum) where a 25 jolly post used to be. Consequently, the important fraction of the forum is worse off, and by the above, the whole forum is worse off.

Now, you can make a marginal utility argument that the first epic strategy post is more valuable than the second, etc. However, beats have a long ways to go before they get up over that huge barrier.

I'm sitting here now thinking this is pretty useless. It's extremely long winded, and it's not going to do many people any good, really. I'm going to post it anyway, though. I'd feel really stupid if I typed all that crap out just to delete it.



In conclusion, I think biggest fraction of the most people are better off if I just move beats to BBV. If something good breaks out in them before I catch them, they stay. Stats posts, eh, I'm not so sure. Maybe I'll make a designated thread for people who want to post <20k samples or people who just want the forum to take a general look at their stats. If you think you have something good (100k+ sample or something unusual), then there's no sense in discouraging a new thread.