Why does fluther not have a "best of" section?

because the CIA keeps that list secret. you have to know th…oh shit, chickens with pancakes!

I think there’s only a very loose correlation between the amount of lurve an answer or a question gets and its “best-ness”. As has often been noted, smart-ass comments frequently get piles of lurve, whereas some amazingly well thought-out answers on less popular topics get only modest recognition. I love the light-hearted, witty stuff, but I don’t think that popularity consistently translates to “best”.

Fantastic idea. Let’s do it.

Harp has a good point. Maybe we should vote periodically (every year? every 6 months?) on the best of each category. That way the most lurved wouldn’t automatically be chosen as the best threads.

What about a Hall of Fame for all questions and answers that get more than “20” lurve

What about voting for a best of? like a separate part of the site?

I don’t know. I am very part-time on a site that does Best Answers – it takes away from things. People get competitive and it’s a mess. No one is ever happy about how things are done.

I wish there was an area where I could save questions that are good resources. There have been a million questions that contain good tricks, tips, web sites, recipes, tech suggestions that I’d love to file away for future reference without having to look for them. If I didn’t answer in the thread, it’s not going to be saved in my ‘Questions You’re Following’ section.

@figbash: you can always hit “Follow this question” at the top.

What would the purpose of a Best Question, or a Best Answer be? There are so many Great Questions, and Great Answers. I think it would be too arbitrary to assign one thing as Best.

@cak I hated that aspect of AV

@harp – me too. I don’t answer on there, anymore. Just visit a few people – maybe post, that’s it.

No offense mi amigo, but if I wanted to participate in a popularity contest I’d go back to high school.

i bet i get a shit ton of lurve for this…

I see your point, Harp and cak. But I love the “Best of” section on Craigslist. For newbies, wouldn’t it be great to have a quick library of legendary questions: salt and pepper, cake, frizzer, pancakes, and the others I’m forgetting?

Sometime I miss some great questions and answers because I dont check Fluther every hour

I dont like filtering through the BS questions to get to the good ones

@Trustinglife – I understand. In theory, it sounds great, but there is always someone that will complain. Some says people only vote for their friends, others say they aren’t popular enough to get enough vote, cheating comes up. Really – I saw people that I thought were level headed people get all uptight about things. Then they went to “hiding” the answers, until votes were in and it hit the fan. People still fussed about cheating.

Truly, I think it starts with the best of intentions, but it goes south, fast.

Do we get “not so good, but you’re on your way!” buttons as well? What about an “i love your point of view but this question is ridonkulous” button?

Lurve does not necessarily imply a great question/comment/discussion. Plus, I’m too old to be playing these number games. Blondesjon sums it up perfectly – high school was high school. I don’t care to relive a popularity contest each day.

I’ve taken to bookmarking my posts I want to reference in the future. It’s not perfect, but it works.

@Trustinglife: Good point, but I think part of the fun for Newbies is learning about the legendary questions one by one, as they come up.

Why not this: when you ask a question, it pulls up a list of related questions and says “are you sure?” or something to that effect?

@cak…People can be so human can’t they? :)

high school was high school… good point. And, being gay is being gay.
Im not worried about popularity and I wouldnt care if none of my Q or A made the list, but like I said earlier I dont check Fluther every hour and often miss some high points that I dont want to go hunting for.

I just thought we were all mature enough to make this happen, but I guess not.

@tennesseejac Theoretically, that’s what the “Questions for you” feature is supposed to do: sort out the ones that correspond to your interests.

@tennesseejac…Peace bro…just calling it as I saw it. Not tryin’ to ruffle any feathers.

gay is gay? wow.

@tennesseejac – no, it’s not that it’s a bad idea, Harp and I just come from a site where it was the beginning of a downfall – of sorts. There were plenty of other factors. The voting, though, was a factor.

@Blondesjon – oh yeah.

@tennesseejac, I find that my personal Fluther helps me keep track of the best questions. If I regularly find a flutherer’s questions and answers interesting, they go in my fluther then I won’t miss any of their great stuff.

tj if it matters, you are in my fluther.

Why not just a section for GOOD QUESTIONS? A good question emits a good answer, does it not?

plus i only ever see good questions that catalyze deep discussion and thought get good question points

yeah, just a suggestion
@Blondesjon & @cak Sorry about the hostility (bad day at work)

@tennesseejac: don’t let a good idea go just because a few respectable members don’t agree with it..

Perhaps there should be a hall of classics- the frizzer for instance- but votes would have to be infrequent, and the winners few; one classic question or exchange chosen every four months or so. With such a selective process, there could hardly be an atmosphere of competition, because the chances of one’s work being chosen would be so small that it would be ridiculous to concern oneself with them. And I am almost tempted to say that voting should be limited to veteran members of the site, who have a feel for the community here and can pick pieces that are representative of the collective. However, narrowing the pool to people who know each other well might possibly open the door to favoritism. Who knows; I doubt any of this will come to pass, as Fluther is perfectly fine as it is and need risk no overhaul.

If anyone’s interested in making their own “Best of Fluther” blog on Wordpress or wherever, with summaries to what they think are cool and awesome questions and comments of the day/week/whatever, this would be cool and neat. But I just can’t see any level of site-sponsored popularity contest to be successful nor encouraging to the community without having serious repercussions on the participation of some users. The lurve system is close enough to a number game, and some choose to use it as such.

You could also consider building a GreaseMonkey script to automatically highlight lurve of a certain value, or comments from a certain user, or whatever criteria you feel makes a post or question great and you wish to have highlighted for you. I’m not exactly sure to go about doing this, nor if it would work easily, but I have heard of similar GreaseMonkey-enabled features in another community.

Regardless of whether I agree or don’t agree, I really liked hearing everyone’s thoughts about this issue, and highly suggest you send your ideas off to Ben and Andrew for them to think about. We are, after all, all portions of the same community. It’s a symbiotic relationship in many ways.

@tennesseejac…I apologize as well if I came across the wrong way.

i do from time to time…

@Jayne I think you’re on the right track.

Why not have a “Question of the Month” which is nominated in and voted on by the moderators? Not trying to put more work on the mods. Sorry kids lol It could be a feature like the monthly (mostly monthly) interviews.

I picture a new monthly feature every 2 weeks. The interview and the question of the month alternating.

My $0.02 :)

I think it was William Shakespeare, in his play Hamlet, that wrote, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

what’s next? advertising and horoscopes?

Actually, I bet Fluther could come up with some wicked horoscopes.

I’m just tossin’ out ideas. Sorry if I went against the grain. You know how much I hate to do that.~

@tennesseejac – I apologize if my opinion was too strong – it truly was one of those days!

Just Saying if a question or an answer has lurve over 20 then I want to read it. Hopefully, I will stumble across them on my Fluther adventure, but sometimes (between 4am – 6am CST) it gets a little lonely in here and I get bored so I wanna enjoy the best ones.

I guess I could just ask the question and people would post their favorites…..

PEACE & LOVE to all

@tennesseejac I agree with you about being bored during the slow times here on fluther. I also agree with the others concerning the whole voting process involved in creating a best of section. Fluther does not need to become like those other cheesy sites. Maybe a best of section could include questions that receive the most responses. Say 50+ response questions could be included. This way, no voting is required and a section will be there for us bored flutherers that may have missed out on some of the good discussions.

@jonsblond i think a lot of questions get 50+ comments on them. if that were to be implemented, it would have to be at least 100 comments, i think.

I thought about that when I put it down. Maybe 75 then?

@jonsblond, however that algorithm would select posts that were not necessarily the “best”. They sure would qualify for some type of “hot” or “popular” questions. For example, consider a troll thread where a few regulars jump in to joke around. Playing “comment ping-pong” could quickly cause the required comment quota to be met, so the conversation would be promoted as being “one of the best” when it’s really just a trollbashing and joshing around.

Something to alleviate boredom could be a “Random Question” section, where you can be brought to a random question based on criteria you enter (questions that have no responses, questions that were asked in the past X weeks, all-time questions from your Fluther, etc).

@dynamicduo true.. like a combination of ”# of comments” + ”# of GA” plus, perhaps, the lurve score of the jelly asking?

@dynamicduo Damn! I thought that I had solved the problem. I didn’t even consider “comment ping-pong”. You are absolutely right.

Yes, a more complex algorithm would take steps towards automatically identifying “best” questions. However, every algorithm has a method that can be gamed, whether purposely or accidentally. The best we can do is take steps to avoid the influence of such gaming.

@eponymoushipster, your algorithm is a great step in the hunt for the “best”. I would offer some suggestions to it, such as reducing the impact of the user’s lurve score, so as to allow for new users to ask “best” questions as well as reduce the occurrence of “not so best” questions asked by high lurve users being promoted as “best”.

Other metrics can be determined based on the server and database information which we can then use in these algorithms.

For instance, the time between comments in a thread can be evaluated (assuming there’s a timestamp for comments in the database, which there might actually not be) – lower intervals means users are replying quickly which would likely indicate a “popular” question, especially if the number of unique users in the discussion is factored in to help reduce the promoting of ping-pong threads.

The number of recently logged in users could also be used to determine whether a thread was of value to be promoted – if many users who are logged in over a certain time period (a few hours maybe) are commenting on the same thread, there is likely something of interest in that thread. Similarly, if many users are logged in and only two are commenting a lot in a thread, chances are it’s comment ping-pong. As well, if a lot of medium to high lurve users are responding to a question asked by a new user, and the question body is very small/the question has no tags/the question contains a URL, this may indicate the question is spam or homework or a troll.

The fundamental issue that underlies all of these algorithms is whether all users consistently use the site in the same way. We have had discussions in the past about whether you give GAs more than GQs, for example. However, since the site does not have a lot of metrics which can be misunderstood (basically it’s only giving lurve to questions and answers, and even that has restrictions to avoid gaming), I would be more confident in the potential successes of such algorithms here versus in other communities where more variables tend to exist.

@dynamicduo yeah, i think that’s correct. I realized just now i meant to say ”# of GQs” above, not GA, btw.

i’m not sure there’s a “time stamp” per se, but the quip #s in the permalinks (which can be culled from the HTML via javascript) are somewhat continuous, but not inside the thread. i think these might have some “time” basis on them.

for example, your last comment, the one i’m replying to, is quip: #quip425050. the previous quip, jonsblond’s last comment, is #quip425029. is this how many minutes/seconds between postings in this thread, or is it how many quips made between quip X and Y in ALL the threads?

test

I imagine the quip ID is a unique identifier for every answer. As a database developer, I would likely put all answers into one table, thus there would be a sequential primary key which is likely the number in the permalink (or would be if I had designed this site).

Your test, combined with looking at my comment directly above the two of yours, would support this theory. Your two quips had two sequential numbers, presumably because you very quickly posted your second test post. However this sequence is not carried backwards through my answer above yours, so I feel it’s safe to conclude what I theorized above is pretty close to what they have set up.

That would mean there could be close to 425,000 answers posted through the history of the site (assuming they started with quip1).

Hey, this reminds me of the time we found out the first ever Tweet. Let’s see if I can pull a similar trickery… we’ll load up the first ever question asked here. It has a discussion number of 1, which lays the theory that the questions are another database table from the answers (I’ve based this on the URL structure pretty much, and intuition). And sure enough, quip number one is Ben’s first reply to his question. That question is actually very interesting metadata-wise, you can skim down the list of quip URLs and see big gaps where presumably other comments in other questions were added – sure enough, looking at question number two shows that the quip numbering remains continuous across the both of those two questions. Thus, the evidence for there being more than 425,000 answers posted between the first ever question and us writing these words right now is very strong. However, without manually verifying each of them exist, I can’t say definitively that there are this many comments, as simply changing the primary key starting value to 399,999 would produce comments in the 400 thousands.

That was a big derail! But yes, if there was somehow no timestamp in the DB, the quip ID could be used to infer the same data. As a developer I find the lack of such timestamps to be a bit surprising, as I would have included such a field on such a constantly-accessed table. Then again with more than 400,000 records, not including the timestamp for each record saves a lot of space, and since questions have timestamps included, the need for comment stamps may have been reduced in priority. Here’s one older discussion on timestamps in Fluther which has some interesting discussions about the issue. Andrew’s comment at the end is, due to his nature with the site, particularly insightful about the public-timestamp issue. Based on his answer, I think it’s clear that all quips do have the server’s timestamp associated with them. That helps with our pseudo-algorithm building here.

yeah that’s what i think – the quip is simply the primary key.

i’ll have to read through this..thanks.

@eponymoushipster and dynamicduo…You two hammer out the tech side, I’ll go and purchase the tiaras and silk sashes for the awards ceremony.

maybe we could start voting on cutest avatar, hottest newb, and most mispeld werds…

@Blondesjon i win the award for “Nicest Junk”.

@eponymoushipster…This is true. You have very thoughtful and polite junk.

@hipster’s junk…thanks again for the petit four recipes

@Blondesjon <my junk points and winks> Right back at ‘cha, kid!

(my junk talks like a 1940s movie producer, fyi)

I want a pink tiara. I hated pink as a kid growing up but can’t seem to get enough of it now. Nevermind drugs, the government should be protecting us from mad colours. So that is my demand for my code slavitude! :D

@dynamicduo I can’t seem to get enough of the pink either :(

@tennesseejac word, brother.