Bitcoin Forum

I think there is a tag that should be on the forums, but isn't.

Some people on the forum are blatant liars, but didn't successfully scam anyone yet.  I think we should have a "Liar" tag, so we know not to trust them (even before they scam someone).

Before someone asks: Yes, I am asking because of the flame-war I've recently had with someone. 

tag Luke-Jr?

Not sure.  I haven't read many of his posts, heh.

Perhaps there should rahter be some kind of feedback wall for users ?


Then one could see how much positive vs. negative feedback a user gets. The feedback could be anonymous, and only mods/admin could see who gave it.

For example, one crook would have 91% negative feedback, then it would be worth going into that users feedback wall to check those messages.

Already exists: WoT.

No, it's not directly attached to this forum. So that's not correct.

What I mean is that if you see a user repeatedly brings false accusations, lies etc, you could simply post on his feedback wall anonymously that sad user is a liar, and link to some examples, or explain some more. If the user receiving the negative feedback disagreed, he would be free to complain to theymos or a mod, and they would make a decision as to whether it's hold some merit or not.

I see.

We've been there. Heck, the ignore button still works that way.

It's horrible. It's a feedback war. If anybody can just mark anybody as uh-so-bad, the result holds an absurd type of information nobody understands. (Who has the most accounts on his side and willingness to abuse such systems?)

The WoT is the way to go, preferably with disabled "total" ratings. Because ratings by just anyone are quite worthless. It matters who rated, and it's everyone's own choice which ratings to trust.

Of course, I never claimed that such a system would be without pitfalls. But isn't most people mature enough to not go into 'rating wars', and wouldn't it be possible to minimize the amount of such wars ? Perhaps you would need a certain amount of '+1'-posts before you were allowed to make any feedback actions ? I posted a thread about 'good post'-rating aka +1 aka karma rating before. I don't have the link.

Point being that when introducing a feature, it's always good to discuss the negatives and the positives.

Allowing rating only after some fixed condition is by no means enough to produce a stable and reasonable result. In fact, it worked just like that on this very forum in the past -- and was a catastrophe.

Rating anonymously is probably not a good idea. It makes voting someone down "just because" way too tempting. Also it reduces the amount of useful information; it's sometimes interesting not only to see how someone has been rated, but also how he rates others. To setup a rating system properly, one has to dive into game theory and show why both the likely and the optimal behaviors of players are also the desired behavior. There might be a way to do it right. Yet I prefer no system to a broken system. Better leave it up to competition from elsewhere.

One way I could imagine as useful: a WoT-like system that lets users select whose opinions they value, and over how many "hops". So everyone is still responsible whom to trust, but it becomes more efficient: if I add Vladimir, and he rates someone "danger, stupid Ponzi", I'm safe no matter how many shills shill for the target. However, if I'm insufficiently informed and add all the shills instead, I'd fall to a "+9001 super duper trustworthy" scammer.

Long story short, I believe in consensus, but I prefer to pick the people who get to add to it. :P Then again, this is how the #bitcoin-otc WoT can be used if you know the right commands or browse it manually. So there we have this solution already, albeit it could use a propped-up UI.



FYI, this is a special case of a general, huge class of problems. Possibly the biggest problem of cooperative humanity. How do we enable someone with limited knowledge of a system to classify the people in it? Put another way: is there a method that enables a fairly uninformed person to reliably distinguish a populist politician from an economic expert?

If we get LIAR tags we need to get ASSHOLE and FAG tags too.

 :D

WTF?  What about SMOOTHIE tags?


I demand it.

Heh.  I feel like "liar" is a little bit less open to interpretation. 

Anyone can call someone an asshole or a fag (although there's nothing wrong with being gay >.>).

Vandroiy,

good post with many good points.

I have participated in various forums, and there's always this problem that you don't know much about a random poster. Is he a 17-year old, or is he a professor in programming ?

Given a specialized field, it's more interesting to learn from those who have achived what you hope to achive, than negative ramblings from random people.

But clearly a system like this takes a lot of work, so at the moment it's not something this forum will take on.