Social Media-inspired features and static content

[sctroyenne]

I've been tossing a few ideas around about curating our content and making it easier to discover "gem" posts. This is in part a suggestion in response to iguanamon's post here. What if at least part of the process of creating the community's static content were automated rather than based on volunteers stepping forward to write content? (Forgive me if many of these ideas have already been presented in disparate other posts).

So we already have a way of voting on posts by attributing hearts to them - an equivalent to "upvoting" on Reddit (which theoretically allows the cream to rise to the top but which doesn't always work, which is why we'd keep humans involved in this process). Users could see posts sorted by hearts to see the board's highlights. The sorting by hearts can be even more complex to make sure everyone browsing this way can see a diversity of content. Hearts in different types of discussions often take on different meanings - in more controversial debates they often just indicate agreement, but in other types of threads they really can be relied upon to identify the most helpful content. This is especially the case when hugely innovative posts about methods get buried in language logs that aren't on everybody's radar. You could sort posts by heart count by board, by language (**we should be tagging posts with specific languages when we refer to them, BTW**), higher than average hearts, hearts/views, etc. Playing with different ways of browsing through what the community deems to be some of the best posts will help others find hidden gems in long threads and in language logs they don't normally follow.

To supplant this voting system, I also propose a sort of "mention" or "retweeting" system. Let's say that in my language log I mention that I found PeterMollenburg's post in his language log on his method for pronunciation and accent reduction incredibly inspiring/useful and that I plan on doing a month-long challenge applying his ideas. Instead of just linking to it as I have done here, I can insert a sort of "mention" that gets counted (sort of like retweeting without actually re-posting all the content). For every subsequent post I discuss using the method, I insert more "mentions". Users can opt to see posts that get referenced a lot and really great content should get even more hearts and mentions, making them even more visible. This becomes another way to tabulate the usefulness of certain posts and a way of identifying our most helpful, even ground-breaking content.

With this kind of data, mods/curators can ask authors of very influential and helpful posts if they want to submit their content to the static bank of knowledge (with perhaps some rewriting/adjustments incorporating insight from ensuing discussion). Thus we have an easier way of curating a diverse collection of methods and techniques rather than relying on a few people to produce all of our collective knowledge.

[zenmonkey]

Some great ideas - personally, while this might to get developed quickly - just wanted to let you know that I'm looking into a few related ideas.

First - I'm interested in getting thread/posts tags in place and looking into sharing from here to outside of the forum via a retweet or repost thread topic function.

From that, I think that integrating a "popular" function via metrics on hearts or mentions is possible but it will be specific bespoken development. Frankly, I'm not there yet in my knowledge of this forum software (or time to do it).

And we need to streamline a little bit more with emk the pulling of updates to the site.

But great ideas