Addressing Community Challenges
Team wis.dm prides itself on listening carefully to our valuable users. We take into account the awesome feedback you all send us, as well as watching closely the activity and sentiments on the site. For quite some time, we've been hearing some sour notes with respect to how people earn points and status within our world, and wanted to provide some perspective.
We offer thumbs-up and thumbs-down on our questions. Not a new concept, and it fits nicely with the binary simplicity we all love about wis.dm. In an ideal world, this feature is used to surface valuable content for the community. We leave this entirely in your hands. We trust you. We also believe that those users who create the best content in the system should get recognized for it, so in that sense, it's perfectly natural to reward users as their questions are given a thumbs-up, and also to cascade negative feedback to users who are spamming, creating inappropriate content, or generally being bad citizens of wis.dm.
We have employed this tactic for quite some time, because we believed ultimately that the sense of our users would prevail, and we would all benefit from such a system. Unfortunately, the egos of some users and the complaints of others have spoiled this experiment. The points "game" took over from the "value" for too many users, and as often happens with these things, a popularity contest emerged.
As of today, the behavior of the site has been changed. Marking a question up or down will only effect its weight in the world, but not have any bearing on the user who spent time to create that question. We're not proud of this change. We also aren't naive, and understand that all communities face challenges like this. We hoped the crowd would work this one out on its own, but have come to the conclusion that they will not. Disappointing, but we'll move forward.
To those folks who've been abusing this feature to either help out your friends or "punish" other members for whatever reason, hopefully this will refocus you on more productive pursuits within wis.dm. To those who have spent lots of time complaining on the site and to Team wis.dm directly, we hope this satisfies your issues so we can return to our regularly-scheduled wis.dming. And to those who don't care at all, we hope this brings back a wis.dm that is less dominated by discussion of wis.dm itself, and brings to the surface more of the great life discussions we enjoy here.
As always, please send us your thoughts, feedback@wis.dm. We continue to listen and our job is to help create a place for everyone here at wis.dm.
