Feature Friday: Disqus Ranks
AVC community regular RichardF suggested a while back that I do Feature Fridays. I'm not sure I can do it consistently week after week, but I'm doing it this week because we have a new feature to disqus.
Disqus has launched "ranks" here at AVC. It is not available across the entire Disqus Blog Network yet. They are giving it a spin here at AVC to get some feedback.
If you look at many of the comments, you'll see a little black "badge" next to the commenters' names. That badge means they are a community regular and that Disqus has been able to give them a community rank. I am fairly certain (but not positive) that these ranks are community specific, meaning they only apply to your activity here at AVC.
There has already been some discussion of the algorithm used to calculate these ranks. Fernando saw the ranks in yesterday's comment thread and did some number crunching. Disqus CEO Daniel Ha replied with some information on what data is used in the ranks algorithm:
We're using a few different signals for ranks right now, including visiting frequency, post, replies, likes, reciprocation of those things, being the first to comment in a thread… etc.
We're playing with the balancing to see what feels right, but I figured the AVC community wouldn't mind playing around with some unpolished features! We're listening to any feedback you guys may have.
So the Disqus team is watching and listening to what we think. Disqus away!
Comments (Archived):
Very cool idea and long-time in the making, right? Think I remember this being discussed in the comments a while ago. Test test, badger.Edit: there it is: 49 / Top 50Edit 2: Daniel – great work: one thing: the font when hovering over the score is kinda hard to read.
i agree about the badges being hard to read. the score and placement numbers in particular are hard on my 50 year old eyes (with glasses on!)
But your badge says you’re “The One” – I’m confused now 🙂
Lol. I thought Wayne Gretzky was “The One”. I think he’s going to get angry if he finds out.
Gretzky was “The Great One.” Not sure that Fred will bite on that moniker.
Close enough…:) If the VC business was like hockey, Fred might well be the Great One. He skates where the puck is going.
Ditto. A star system or Platinum, Gold, Silver etc.. color scheme perhaps is another suggestion.
Digging the hair style there Fred!
that’s called “just rolled out of bed”
That look will cost you about $170 at a stylist out here in L.A. ;P
Oh you became the “Bartender” over night – very cool.
Great experiment. There are numerous ways of calculating, depending on the blog community disqus is involved with… a matter of real time data gaining attention.
What a great feature. I feel like most products become popular because of its ability to recognize a user and their contributions within a community. Think foursquare major-ship. This is a no brainer.
you’re a Foursquare Major? i didn’t know they switched to a military naming convention 😉
secret beta app =)You can even fire a salve of sandwiches if you’re checked in at subway and start a bio-war when checked-in at Starbucks!Fear, the check-in war is only starting 😉
haha
Ha, it’s special full metal jacket edition. In honor of 2012, 25th anniversary. 🙂
ha. i think you’re on to something…**
Do the ratings show when we log into Disqus profiles? I see them here, but would love to preview my rating even when not leaving a comment.
FWIW — no badges on an iPad.
there are a number of disqus features that aren’t supported on the iPad they should work on that
My avc activities are likely 90% iPad. Disqus is not smooth there. HTML5 anyone?
Great idea. The type is a bit hard to read especially on the javascript rollover.
This is a good feature. Does the ranking take into account the relevance of the comments/replies as well. I feel it should. But nice, Disqus.
A great idea. I like ‘The One’. Do you choose that Fred, or is that Disqus’ doing?We were just playing around with ranks. It’s interesting although users suggested that they didn’t look at ranks very much, I found that it does influence commenting behavior.Some people take a cynical view to ranking and scores on social sites, but IMO due to the nature of the medium and in inconsistent visiting they are informative and work as a social glue by making people notice each other in another dimension.
i didn’t pick “the one”i’d go with something else if they’d let me
Yeah. I guess that’s the kind of name that would be a bit difficult to grant yourself. 🙂 They should let you customize that.
Given the name of the blog it should be “the vc” or “a vc”.BTW, love Feature Fridays!BTW 2, Daniel’s Twitter profile and mine are link jealous of Richard’s 🙂
I now have to comment just so I can see what my rank is. Damn their evil genius.EDIT: Nada. Now I’m sad.
if you are a web and music geek, we need you here more often
I’m here every day, I guess I just tend to listen rather than comment on here. Not sure why, normally you can’t shut me up.
That’s fine, we need all types- and sometimes listening is better…(if one thing despite the rank, this community has taught me to listen better)
I prefer the term lurker as I typically am one.
I was going to say voyeur, but as we’ve gathered, I’m new here and wasn’t sure it was appropriate 🙂
We need lurker ranking badges. Points for showing up.Extra points for sharing a post on Twitter.There must be a way to track this.
Yup! Like that idea. Perhaps this will also develop into “Show me the ‘DISQUSFAX'” along the lines of “show me the car fax” 🙂
Come back, Shane.I mean, Ciaran!
Just showered you w some Likes. Come back soon!
OK. So let’s see what I get.Edit: Wow, Nada. Bummer.
PROTIP: Refresh page to see your rank. Feature does not work with real-time updates
Ah, much better. Now where are my reading glasses?Thanks Andy!
19!go erik
Refresh and look again.
One feedback I have is that the ranks are impossible to read. The font size is too small.
Agree with the font size comment. Also wish the button was clickable, and that it would take me to a page that shows all of the Top 25/500/etc. Overall though an awesome feature. Go Disqus!
right, the badge should be clickable
I like the direction. A couple of comments:-If you give a score, it’s best to show how you better it. Human nature wants to get a better rank, collect more, be the ‘mayor’, etc. If this can encourage more commentors, its a win.-Most interested with the in-community out-of-community design aspect. Disqus more than anything to me is about community. In AVC is interesting and fun. In the Disqus ecosystem as a whole, if this is somehow a guide to show the connections between communities…that’s a gold mine.
Aye, especially on the ‘more commentors’RE:”-If you give a score, it’s best to show how you better it. Human nature wants to get a better rank, collect more, be the ‘mayor’, etc. If this can encourage more commentors, its a win.”
Exactly. If they can take this community and do something with the data they have on us, that’s indeed a goldmine. Forget these stats. Yes, they are the results of hours of Commenting hard labor, but they are a means to an end. Ok, so now I’m in this Club- what else can I get except for seeing the same people every day?
I’m glad to see you every day here William;)But to your point. If this post was titled “What do you want from a Disqus API?”, I’m betting there would be a lot of discussion. The data pool below the 750,000 blogs is a explicit and implicit map of thoughts and conversations on communities across the web.It is the Disqus web. I want it to be a map for my web to explore on their dataset.Then again, its easy to abstractly just ‘want’ everything. They are building a great business and know the data set and I’m glad to have them steering the ship. But…I’ll keep jostling and nudging them.
Good distinctions between the Disqus API and Disqus discussion forum. In my opinion, the Disqus API should be exploited and adopted further. Look at Klout’s API…it’s all over the place already.
You get my love William, you get my love..
Yes. Need a feedback system and what behavior will get you to the next level.
Sounds like a good feature – just wish I could find it! Then and again, maybe I’m just an irrelevent tweep who has no feedback and just can’t see it yet.
Based on my analysis, I think the disqus algorithm is giving people a rank 7-8 spots below where they should be. Will investigate.My main feedback is that the icon is kind of hard to read and I think a hover/click should give you a fuller explanation of how score is calculated. “How do I improve??”Also– site owner should be able to call himself whatever he wants!Awesome for a first roll out though. Now I feel like I have something to defend and improve– which leads to me participating more — which is a great benefit for all of you. 🙂
i agree about them calling me “the one”i’d like to be “the bartender”
Are you Coach, Sam, or Woody? 😉
a mashup
Taking that a step further would be changing from Top # over to naming the categories using humor. Would just need to see how sensitive the audience is regarding laughing at self with others…
i’d love to be able to change top 50, top 250, etc to names of my choice
True. The options are endless from Looney Tunes awarded (Foghorn Award, Chicken Hawk….) over thru more original…
exactlyit would make things so much funi love earning badges on foursquare like “crunked” or “shopaholic”
How about ‘host”4 lettersNot particularly fun but evokes a sense that this is your playground.
I like this.
as owner, I think you should be able to name yourself whatever you want
“Poobah”
Copyright Roger Ebert.
Love it!FW: what’s your poison bud?J: vodka martini. just whisper the word vermouth over the shaker. 4 olives.FW: if your lip was any lower, you would have tripped coming in. What’s troubling you?J: let me tell about this founder I know, ……
Have to agree with Andy, we’ve tried out a few systems for integrating with our sites and DisQus is definitely the most rounded of the bunch. The idea of making the whole thing more sociable is just common sense.
Andy what would be really funny would be like a Sadie Hawkins day where we get to swap commenting ‘roles’ and pretend to be each other.
Dangerous!!! I like it.
Plus, learning to think like me will improve your Rank!
You are on such a roll! That would be so fun.We could do comment roulette.
Little bug: it doesn’t show with the real time updating.
Other than people typing junk to increase their “rankings” and generate more pageviews, is there any significant use?
yeah, i think it creates an incentive for people to engage, or engage more frequentlywe have great disqussions here at AVC, so the more the merrier
Here it works well, but what about Engadget? Pretty sure the community there wouldn’t stop trying to up their score. This system works pretty well for a community like AVC, but could be fatal to a site like Engadget. To work well globally this feature might need to let moderators/owners customize the rankings so that it better reflects what is valued (taking Engadget as an example again, i’d rule out using first to comment and temper the number of likes some gets based on how much comments there are on a single post).
Good point. The behaviors will vary by community and AVC is an ideal place to test this out. I can see this as an incentive to “gaming” the ranking on some sites, but here it does seem to function as a signal. There’s plenty of quality here already without the added recognition, but it’s worth a try to see how it works.
Agreed, it works very well here.What i’m most interested in seeing coming out of this is as @awaldstein:disqus previously mentioned in another comment, the cross connection between various communities (think AVC and Both Sides of the Table, lots of familiar faces) is one of the biggest gold mine of this feature in my opinion.
I seriously doubt it – it does however give people a great sense of well-being to be awarded “rank”
I don’t know if it’s really good spam tools or careful, rapid curation, but I rarely see spam in the AVC comments.
disqus does a good job with spam but i deleted at least one comment spam per thread and sometimes four or five
It’s so fun to be the one who clicks on that flag when a spammer appears.Maybe because of my time zone, I’ve had that honor a few times.
With all my joking about score-gaming, the reality is you can’t sustain ballot-box-stuffing behavior for terribly long. It just gets boring.Either you truly enjoy commenting and ‘seeing’ the others here, or you don’t. The intrinsic reward is what keep you going. High scores are an accumulation of basically daily commenting for a year or more. Anyone who can fake that truly has too much time on their hands.
Not sure junk flies here. Although I guess we each have different definitions for what is junk.
This might be slightly off-topic but there is a good chance that the message will get to the Disqus team so bare with me for a moment. I would like to thank Disqus from the buttom of my heart for their product. Before using Disqus my blog was a silent desert. It was like I am talking to myself. After Disqus, I cannot keep up with the incoming comments. The difference is like day and night. Disqus not only lowers the barrier of engagement for the readers, it turns it into a delightful experience. So, thank you very much Disqus team.
No ranks on Android. :-(And does that mean my mobile commenting doesn’t count towards rank?
no ranks on ios either. i think its a rendering issue not a calculation issue
Ranks show just fine on my Android 7″ tablet (which only runs Gingerbread). I can even tap the box (since I can’t mouse over) and the stats pop up.On Nexus S (also Gingerbread), it’s missing because I only get the main column/simplified version per the mobile format that the site is designed to serve when it detects a mobile device. There really should be a link at the bottom of each mobile version screen that toggles “mobile version” / “full site”. I suspect ranks would then show up.
pretty solid social featurethough i wonder if it will scare some people away from commentingi know many who are ‘afraid to speak up’ because they assume everyone here is an authority of some sort – hoping the badges don’t add to that
That definitely happens.Also something that happens over time that’s pretty magical — if you ascribe to that, Reece — is that people’s online/commenting persona emerges and it uniquely adds to the brew/spirit of the total conversation.That’s not captured in any scoring but that journey is what I think we’d want newbies to embark on: establishing their unique voice, comment by comment.I learn as much during the commenting as I did before I commented. Make sense? I comment bc I learn from it. It’s a deeper learning/synthesis of the topics that I cannot reach thru just reading.
“…they assume everyone here is an authority of some sort…”I don’t know about anyone else, but even without badges I assumed this when I was a newbie. And even without badges I figured out pretty quickly who the regulars were and felt honored when one of you replied to me.How cool if you are a newbie and someone who is a Top 50 responds to or likes your comment?
🙂
Cool feature but important to remember there’s a thin line between gamification and gimmick.Ranks should encourage engagement and depth of discussion and reward positive behaviour. Giving points for arbitrary things like first to comment may end up detracting from the environment rather than adding to it.UI & typography need a lot of work. Font is impossible to read, background semi-transparent – urghh – not sure if adding rankings to disqus cheapens the experience. At the very least I would make them available only on hover/click and not on the default view. The content of the comment should do the talking.
Brilliant! RE: “The content of the comment should do the talking.”
Great comments LIAD. I definitely agree with you about the typography and avoiding “gimmification”. Honestly, as a relatively new commenter on AVC, I must admit I feel a little less “welcome” since the badges went up. I guess there might be some trade-off between rewarding and recognizing regulars and maintaining a open door to new visitors.Perhaps it would help if the badges weren’t so prominent… they do kind of “shout” at you right now… and perhaps not convey the full spirit of this blog.
Hey hey, Kevin, WELCOME! Just wanted to say that. Glad you’re here and talkin’.
Speaking of L1AD, he is a TQC (Total Quality Commenter). Sterling…never seen a less-than-brilliant comment from him. No chat, just hits it between the eyes.I’d Like him more often but I’m jealous and don’t want to tank my own score.
who cares? it isn’t about the score, it is about community building and getting people to be active….
It was a joke, dahlink. :-+
Well since I don’t have any chance of catching up with you, I can “like” YOU all I want — and L1AD! I know you are kidding but, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some degree of competition in this community. I think this group does quite well given that many of the people here are in roles that require at least some degree of competitive instinct — maybe even a lot.(It’s also a component in most recruiters’ makeup as well — don’t let that sweet, smiling avatar fool you.)Although I must say that some of you toppers are also the ones who seem to make an extra effort to contribute to the community-ness of this community.
You are always wanted here, having people come by and speak an opinion is what makes this blog powerful
commenters are never unwelcome here particularly ones with well considered opinionsi hope we hear more from you kevin
You have lots of meaningful, considerate feedback here, but I’ll add my view anyway. I think this is a worthwhile exploration, but rankings within communities can have a deleterious effect on the sense of social equality. If it’s done with a light touch, and not with glorification, it can be fun, but there’s lots of evidence of such features changing the behaviour of users. Flickr has a feature called “Explore” and people whose images make it there are often proud of it, and therefore change their behavior (their photography in this case) in hopes of getting into “Explore”. Unfortunately, the photography often moves towards a style (typically over-saturated, over-processed images) which get lots of clicks rather than new expressions and experimentations.Well, this went long (need an espresso), but color me “cautious” with any type of social ranking system. I hope that the Disqus team will carefully consider the wide range of feedback and protect the integrity of the content and the comfort of gentle users.
Thank you to everyone for being so considerate of my feelings. Maybe I was being a little sensitive since I am passionate about building SAFE and OPEN community. You have definitely proven that AVC is this type of community!ShanaC thank you for your kind words. Nick Selvaggio, it is an interesting thought about “rankings” being an incentive to comment more. I’m not sure if I totally agree though… I know what you mean but I’m not sure if I would ever want to let a ranking influence whether I comment or not. Donna Brewington White, that’s awesome that a lack of a badge would motivate you to reach out to a person. That’s the best argument I’ve heard yet for the badges. 🙂 Yes, it was my fear that badges would promote a certain clique-ishness and, like you said, I can clearly see AVC is not this type of community. fredwilson, thank you for your encouragement. Dale Allyn, you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned the “deleterious effect on the sense of social equality.”. I think that is what I was fearing. I have a hunch that people are drawn to this blog because of an unusual (projected) sense of social equality from Fred and the AVC community. I think the last thing we would want is to mess with this mojo that is so clearly working. Flickr is a very interesting case study.Thank you again to everyone!
IT NOT LACK OF BADGE THAT DRAW ATTENTION.IT WRITE WORDS THAT WORTH READING.
Donna has an astonishingly positive outlook, we’re lucky to have her here listening and learning with us. Ignore the badges if they deter you from wanting to contribute, they mean little compared to the quality of your comments.
I totally agree with Mark here and second his encouragement: do not be intimidated or deterred, after all, unless you have courAge to enter the race you will never place let alone win so just do it. Sent from my Verizon BlackBerry via BES on XO hosted Outlook.
ALL BEHAVIOR GAMEABLE.ALL SYSTEMS TO ENCOURAGE BEHAVIOR LEAD TO GAME SYSTEM.TRICK IS MAKE GAMERS NOT BREAK SYSTEM.
Trick is to not to have a have system to encourage behavior.
I appreciate your comment and am glad you were honest about the badges making you feel less welcome. If anything the lack of a badge next to someone’s name makes me want to reach out even more to that person because it means you are a newer voice and my experience of this community is that we love new voices as much as we enjoy the familiarity and reliability of the “regulars”. The badges are just a reflection of past behavior in this community — nothing more.At least two of the top 5 are relatively new voices — I still remember @Tereza:disqus ‘s first comment and the week that @ShanaC:disqus first began commenting. The welcome that they received from @fredwilson:disqus and the rest of the community is part of what encouraged me to speak up more. The one thing I’ve learned — and my involvement here is proof of this — this community is not a clique.
Kevin, I agree… but at the same time I think it is an incentive for us “new” folks to comment more. Although as with many popular communities lurkers are pervasive. If the algorithm takes visit frequency into account, as fredwilson suggests, we may see an interesting skew in the lurkers ranks. In addition, just thinking out loud, but maybe something to @ the top 5, top 25 etc would be cool. Although this may alienate other members more.
NEXT @DISQUS CHOOSE BETWEEN ACHIEVEMENT BADGES AND NOT JUMPING SHARK. #NEWRANKINGS
Interesting… although chill with the caps. I was not aware of the term “Jumping the Shark” until you posted this. Lets hope the comments do not start to decrease in quality… its a large part of why I come here.
GRIMLOCK TEACH YOU LOTS OF THINGS IF PAY ATTENTION.INCLUDING REASON FOR TALK LOUD.
“although chill with the caps”You get used to it after a while. ;-)Grows on you.(well, speaking for myself)
I like the idea of not being visible by default.The comment do the talking can be achieved increasing the like weight into the calculation. But they they should let us like by email. I do a lot disqus in gmail and I want to like just replying some code.
I agree — email Likes are a big miss and also iPad/iPhone features are light.And I still think Fernando wins the prize for Best Profile Pic.We need some more qualitative prizes, kind of like “paper plate awards”, that are community-nominated and given. Jokey ones. Wouldn’t that be fun? So someone can nominate anyone else and make up a kooky name of an award and then everyone else up-votes it.
I agree with your points. I’m only posting right now because I want to increase my rank. However, isn’t that evidence that the strategy may increase engagement? While I’ve never been motivated by the badges of, say, Foursquare or Facebook, I would love to share that Top 25 badge. Ultimately, though, you are right – the content should speak for itself.
It’s got the potential to degenerate into a trophy hunting syndrome.The “How many friends do you have on Facebook?” nonsense.
Unfortunately I agree.
Agree, I think these types of rankings are best done across networks. Klout.com for example. When the scope is one niche community I tend to think “biggest loser” more than I think “winner”.
“First to comment” = not quite an evenhanded metric. There’s a natural inclination toward it anyway so I wouldn’t include it. L1AD and RichardF will always have a head start vs. Donna.
new tourist board commercial “move to London. Alongside the terrible weather and anarchy, you now also get first dibbs on being AVC’s first commentor of the day”
LOL — I can picture you leaning over your laptop waiting for Fred’s blog to post. Lightenin’ from those fingertips!
Yeah — that’s versus SF or LA: “great weather…but all you can do is synthesize everyone else’s AVC comments. Pffft.”
That, and some of us are better served by asking questions
Shana, that’s an excellent point. Questions are SO important in moving the conversation along and also integrating it. A big part of the power of the board is that we interact WITH each other and it’s not just a list of ad hoc comments. (which is most places) Three ways to engage w other: (1) debate/disagree, (2) develop someone’s comment further, (3) ask a question And you know I’m a big believe in questions.Plus some of us feel good about ourselves when people ask us questions. Makes us feel useful.
So what’s your question? hehe, sorry Tereza, I had to! 😉
ha!
i think you might want to be a coach. according to jerry, asking questions is the secret to being a coach
When I saw this, I just wanted to laugh – I’ve gotten a lot of different career choices shown to me because of y’all…
Also if you are on the west coast on east of NYC you will not be the first to comment unless you are syncing your life around the time Mr.Wilson posts his blog, which is generally by 9AM EST.So time when one comments should not be a weight in rankings or if it is it has a negligible weight.
OMG, what? You aren’t? LOLAnyone using LOL should be demoted at least one rank.
Too bad there’s not a decent ping system to know exactly when posts go up.
Actually it’s a bit earlier than that. More like 6-7 ET. Least it used to be.
it’s almost always an early riser in the eastern part of north america or someone from europe
I was very impressed the morning @msuster:disqus was the first to comment (from Los Angeles for anyone who doesn’t know). One for the home team.I was actually awake that time — and not from the night before.
Ahem! There was that one time I pulled an all nighter (or at least the one time I will admit) and was the first to comment. Another time, I could have but withheld and as I recall @pegobry:disqus took that honor and did a much better job than I would have.It is a bit of a bummer to be late to the party so often. But at least I get to keep the doors open until @RichardForster:disqus shows up. He’s good about checking in on the previous day’s post as well as the new one. When he begins replying to or liking my comments, I know it’s time to go to bed. But he’s so fun that sometimes I’m tempted to stay up longer!
I love this visual! Indeed — RichardF on one end and Donna on the other are like a picture frame around a wonderful Disqus Day. 🙂
sniff sniff
I agree that some things like ‘first post’ or ‘most replies’ are worthless, or at least worth less than most/average replies, likes, etc. Social pressures will keep people in line for the most part (at least here, maybe not on TechCrunch), so I doubt we’ll see much activity JUST for rank, at least not in the long term. The real value of disqus IMHO though is in network wide identity/reputation/rank. It’s the thing that’s had me excited about their potential since I first discovered them, and I think this is a great step towards that.
I’m a vocal supporter of Disqus. They’re one of the most exciting companies in the social web and a true unsung hero.They effectively own the decentralised interest and reputation graph. Throw in a open auth system and the sky’s the limit.
Disqus is the best commenting system I’ve seen yet. Which is why it has been discouraging to see it replaced on some high-traffic sites with Facebook comments.
Yes especially because Facebook won’t do anything to improve the system and just rely on their reach.
As far as I can tell, it doesn’t let you edit comments after you post them, or include a number of other Disqus features. Even more annoying, although it is supposed to let you log in with different IDs (not Twitter though, for some reason), when I tried leaving a comment on a blog yesterday with my Yahoo ID, I got a pop-up after typing three letters, asking me to sign in via Facebook. Some of us still aren’t on Facebook, and aren’t interested in joining the site.
SOME SITE OWNERS HATE INTERNET. CAN TELL BY WAY THEY USE FACEBOOK COMMENTS INSTEAD OF @DISQUS.
I’m guessing there’s some money or similar exchanged in those instances.
The issue is that Disqus, so far, and publicly is just a commenting systems. No mean feat to be the best BUT by being the best and most used, you by definition create the next level of possibilities.At their core…in their DNA….in the dataset they are:-a community infrastructure-a wire frame for the global interest graph-explicit contextual search, implicit connector-bloggers best friend for traffic-developers most pined for API-passionate web explorers best guide to like minded souls and the most relevant dynamic communitiesNot kvetching, just wanting more.
There’s another, practical problem for those of us who aren’t on Facebook: although Facebook comments list other options for signing in (such as Yahoo!), when I’ve tried to sign in with one of those other options recently, I’ve been unable to, and prompted to log in via Facebook instead.
Given that I’m conspicuously lacking any “black badge” here and thus looking for reasons to add comments and build my quota instead of just “lurk and read”, I’ll take this opportunity to agree with Mr. Pinsen on this issue. Thank you for this opportunity David! :)Rev. 1. BTW: The foregoing was meant to be a light hearted facetious comment teasing about the idea of badges and ranking – hence why I referred to Dave Pinsen as Mr. Pinsen but that subtlety would be lost on most readers – I was actually not at all dismayed when I did not see any badge since my contributions are based upon contributing value to the community rather than on scoring points as I have explained in other responses in this thread and in reply to Fred letting me know I was #46. Nonetheless, I’m quite happy with that ranking. Enuff already!I’ve made the point before how sites adopting FB comment appear to end up with the comment stream subsequently being split in 2 with some people responding directly to the stream in FB instead of in the original article thread: Not helpful or useful. And don’t get me started on comments being added via Google+!
you are number 46 peter
Thank you Fred.Actually, I noticed something interesting after adding my first comment.First: As I continued reading I noticed someone else had mentioned that the badge – if initially not showing – will do so after a refresh. So I tried that and mine did!Second: After my first comment,my badge showed 47. By time I had gone through the whole comment thread (then 349 long – thank goodness for time on Sundays for equivalent to reading NYT from top to bottom 🙂 ) my badge showed 46 as you reported so I guess I must have been on the cusp of 47/46 at the start.Now, if I do not find time today to add anything to MBA Monday, it will be interesting to see how that may affect my rank. But, as I said in one of my comments, since my days as a boy scout, I have had no interest in “scoring points” per se, I am much more gratified by contributing to success and to learning from the contributions of others such as you.Sent from my Verizon BlackBerry via BES on XO hosted Outlook.
Glad you refreshed, Peter. In addition to your thoughtful comments, you are so generous with your support and encouragement. That’s gotta count for something!
i agree that network wide reputation is particularly interesting
SHOULD BE SEPARATE RANK. NOT ALWAYS RELEVANT TO NICHE COMMUNITY.
Thanks. There are a lot of signals available, and “fun” things like being the first to comment doesn’t necessary place a lot of weight on how this is calculated (right now, it doesn’t very much).
Daniel, I think you guys rock. Outstanding product, great company culture.I want you guys to win and win big.You’ve already got the interest and reputation graph. Tack on a auth system…job done.You have a classy and elegant product. Overt game mechanics have the potential to detract from the experience not add to it. It’s great your testing them on handpicked communities before doing a system wide rollout
Thanks – we won’t be doing anything wide for a bit. What’s powering most of this is not visible to users and it’ll provide a good framework for different types of features (not just ranks).
BUT HORRIBLE DESIGN MAKE IT SO HACKERY AND COOL! USABILITY FOR STUPID HUMANS THAT WANT TO READ THINGS WITHOUT HAVING TO GO INTO DEVELOPER TOOLS.
Adding a competitive framework to a supportive community is a bad bad bad bad idea. (can we tell how much i hate this?) When tumblr did it, i wrote a blog post about it called “omg you like, such a loser – competition and curating community” http://leighhimel.blogspot….
One of the quotes I wrote down this week:”Creative people are motivated by respect from their peers… they value merit, and no longer find true status in their wealth and thus try to downplay it.” –Richard Florida’s, The Rise of the Creative ClassIt suggest an interest in rankings, not as the bottom line to everything, but to give a sense of reputation amongst peers.
Peer review and respect is not only powerful, it has been proven time and again to be the most accurate.
I think you’ve hit on something, Robert. Thanks for sharing this.
Well said Robert.And I agree with JLM and Donna. In fact, is it not also fair to say that having and feeling respect for each other is also what draws liked minded people together and why peer review has the impact that it does. Is it not also why so many are drawn to “lurk and read” if not to also comment and contribute to blogs like this one of Fred’s?And, btw, I’ve also made many more connections through having “lurked and read” here resulting in the urge to “contribute” here than I have elsewhere on other otherwise ‘anonymous bloggers’ blogs for most of the other blogs upon which I have contributed I discovered here first. Also collected a few of –what I’ve considered to be – worthwhile twitterers to follow based upon what I’ve read of them in this blog.Examples: Arnold Waldstein, Carl Mistlebauer, Dave Pinsen, Donna White, Mark Essel, Mark Suster, Tereza Nemessanyi, Charlie Crystle, even Gotham Girl 🙂 and a few others.
Pretty cool, but sometimes I get worn out by all this “game” social stuff like Foursquare.
foursquare has been killing it the past couple monthsthe service has improved so much so fast my head is spinningfirst they finally got the android app working rightthen they got notifications and commenting and pictures working rightand then lists and events in the past weekwow
I agree: Foursquare’s doing a great job. But I have enough stress and shit going on to worry about maintaining my “mayorships” and whatnot. It gets exhausting 😉
For this community I think it could work. Generally, I’m not a fan of rankings and “popularity” and was quite glad that Tumblr got rid of Tumblarity. It felt like it penalized you more than credited you.
I will just reply to what I was going to post rather than starting a new thread. I agree with your thoughts about the potential for it to work in this community @kirklove After a few minutes passed seeing it yesterday I wondered how it might potentially decrease postings/replies, especially from folks that do not post often or at all. Sort of a ‘why bother posting / comment ennui effect. If this type of impact is possible I am thinking if it is more likely on an older site than a newer site (doubtful because everyone is starting off with a low/no rank).I don’t know this line of thinking just hit me yesterday after spending a few minutes on the site. These rankings can supercharge commenting by regular folks obviously. A type of gamification. So, if that is what is desired by a blog owner then I think these rankings could be awesome. Still just thinking out loud about this at the moment and taking it all in honestly.{Updated}
I think many of us love AVC because it’s a welcoming community. No matter who you are, you are always welcomed if you respect the very few rules. Ranking may detract someone to reply critically or to step in because all the others are top 10 or something like that.But with some care it can be fun.
@fernandogutierrez:disqus I agree about the AVC community that is why I stated that at the beginning of my post; I am not sure this community would be subject to the issue I bring up. I can see where other communities might though.
With all my talk about trying to make the top, I think what you’re saying is absolutely true. The mechanism needs to provide the first-time user immediate positive feedback/delight so they’re part of the game and come back. The feeling of a closed club would stand in the way of that.
The in crowd vs. out crowd.I just pretend I’m in the in crowd – no one can really knows I’m just randomly wandering around this universe..
Leaderboards are effective when the person who’s looking at it feels they have a shot at getting to the top of the leaderboard.So optimally, what you’d see show’s a ranking of 10 people and shows a friend of yours behind you, a friend of you’re in front of you, and the top scorer in that set of 10 is a score that’s in your reach if you stretch a little…..rather than the winner of the whole kit-n-caboodle (which is discouraging).
foursquare resets the leaderboards every week.i think disqus should think about that in some waybut i also don’t want to devalue the years of commenting that many of you have done
You need some kind of more sophisticated decay function. The equivalent of a half life for comments and likes.
I think a variety of options need to be allowed, and then the best ones picked depending on the end result desired for each community; Traffic levels and behaviour would play quite a role too.
The thing is, I don’t think people will engage in conversation if they don’t feel they have some clue of what they’re talking about — and if they don’t then their comment will get lost in the mix.. and even if you have a clue it still has a fairly good chance of getting lost; Though there are enough high quality comments and conversation that exists, so it’s all good..
I think you make a valid point for the most part Matthew in suggesting that “I don’t think people will engage in conversation if they don’t feel they have some clue of what they’re talking about”.However, human nature being what it is, there may be occasional exceptions to that notion though such exceptions seem to be quite rare in this forum.More often than not, there is always something to be usefully learned from the content of these threads.
Off topic. For LCD fans, fell asleep to this new, strange James Murphy mix on Beats in Space: http://www.beatsinspace.net…
ooohgo off topic more often please!!!!!
Hmmm, I’m not sure about this.
you are so into adding pictures to your comments these daysyou got me to do itsee the reply below to david noel
I was going through some old pictures last week looking for a picture of a classmate of mine who had died and I was not going to give up until I found it. I found it.The interesting thing was all the interesting things I had done which I had on digital which I had never shown to my kids.My kids are at that precious age where they have decided that not only is there a remote, tiny chance I might have been cool once upon a time but also that I have done some cool stuff along the way.I think it comes from their comparing their self-funded lifestyle with the one I have provided thus far. My banker son is convinced he will never attain that lifestyle on his own.Any way the pictures have stuck with me maybe because of the melancholy of the death of this friend of mine.There are some pictures of my wife from her early 30s that are just unbelievable. I had forgotten how gorgeous she was. It is kind of pathetic on my part.
That’s a great shot.Really sorry about your friend. That’s hard.
Hey JLM, not to get all Oprah on you, but I recently read, in a book on gamification of all things, that there are 3 tangible actions you can do every day which will actively raise your happiness. One is random acts of kindness to strangers. I know for a fact you do this frequently.The second is 5 minutes of reflecting on death. Sounds odd, but in fact it puts people in a more serene, grounded, perspective-laden place. So by honoring your friend with us, you are doing something good for yourself too. Feel comfort in that and I’m sure your friend would too.The third is to dance in a totally hokey, silly way. Literally. So my reco to you would be, lock the door to your office, crank up the music and go nuts for about 5 minutes.Then you can go hunt down your wife and remind her how beautiful she is. I know you’d both enjoy that.
Your EQ is off the charts.
Actually, I could use some Oprah just about now.My damn little Shih Tzu — the only midget 6’4″ dog in history — had an eye infection and unfortunately ended up losing his eye. Shih Tzu’s have those weird looking bulging eyes and he has had some trouble or another for the last year or so.I had spent all night Tuesday night giving him antibiotic eye drops every 30 minutes all night long trying to save the eye and kill the infection.Unfortunately in the middle of the night the eye ruptured and began to bleed so there was no way to save it. The cornea was just too damn thin. He lost his vision. Once the eye ruptures the deterioration is irreversible.He had the eye removed and now has a semi-nasty looking eye flap where before he had an eye. I am sure it will fill in with fur — easy for me to say.I have always known that dog is smarter than me. I imagine him saying to me — “Hey, big fellow, I entrusted that eye to you and you let me down.”It actually is an awful feeling when someone puts their safety in your hands and you fail them.I know that I did everything possible to save that eye but still I am inconsolable as that dog was counting on me and I failed him. He is 14 years old and will probably live to 25 but I will always feel like hell about that eye.I love reading Rudyard Kipling when I am depressed:We’ve sorrow enough in the natural way,When it comes to burying Christian clay.Our loves are not given, but only lent,At compound interest of cent per cent.Though it is not always the case, I believe,That the longer we’ve kept ’em, the more do we grieve:For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,A short-time loan is as bad as a long–So why in Heaven (before we are there)Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?
Virtual hug, JLM.
If my memory serves me correctly from reading previous posts of yours JLM, you felt the same sense of responsibility for the troops under your command back in that day and you feel the same sense of responsibility for the people who work with you in your business and, in relative terms, also for your customers given your “Urgent Excellence” Manual so it would be extraordinarily uncharacteristic of you if you did not feel such responsibility towards your faithful Shih Tzu.My guess would be that your dog actually feels he has let you down rather than the other way around. Loyal loving dogs are amazing companions notwithstanding that they are, in fact, animals.
BTW: Remind me to tell you, some time, an old British joke about retailing spirits after hours. It is doggy related. And Rudyard Kipling has a verse suited for many occasions.
@PeterBeddows:disqus Thanks for the sentiments but I fear the problem is always me.In the ante-room to my office is the following picture.It is the Titantic.I always see myself as being responsible for everything that happens or fails to happen. I am just wired that way.The Shih Tzu — sleeping about 3′ away is going to be OK but he is working the deal. I would say he will forgive me in a couple hundred years.
Of course JLM: You are most welcome. And I would expect nothing less from someone like you.I also believe that we are each respectively responsible for everything that happens or fails to happen though possibly not so much from the same standpoint as you; rather that life itself is a classroom and everything that comes our way is part of the curriculum. Hence there are neither victims nor winners, per se; only survivors and the defeated. It’s all in how we process whatever seemingly “happens” to us and what is placed before us is always opportunity in one way or another.Well that should open a hornets’ nest! {grin}
JLM,Back in the early 90’s my wife’s baby brother, who always had a knack with animals decided he wanted to show Shih Tzu…and of course he talked me into going to a couple of dog shows to give my opinion on how he would do and whether there was money in it…Before I knew it I was a partner in the business and I had bought myself a pekingese. While he did an awesome job and was quite successful, he got fed up with the whole dog show world and gave up on it in 2003. You can check out the website here http://taoregency.com/We have one shih tzu that suffered the same problem when she was 3 and she is now 13….keep a watch over the other eye, keep a couple of tubes of terramycin around and use it the first time you see a little glazing in the remaining eye (use eye was first then give them the terramycin)
Sorry to hear about your friend, JLM.This comment tells a lot about you, you know.All good.
First, let me add that I am also saddened to hear about the loss of your old classmate: Such events tend to act as a really poignant reminder of our own mortality because of the relative proximity of age to our self. My condolences to you JLM.Second: Boy, do I ever relate to “My kids are at that precious age where they have decided that not only is there a remote, tiny chance I might have been cool once upon a time but also that I have done some cool stuff along the way.” I’m just so happy that my son now has 4 kids under the age of 7 ~ being a granddad is sweet revenge!!! :)Third: I have a mass of photos – the old kind – and even a bunch of old single8 movie reels that I have been meaning to put onto a DVD for my children and grandchildren for their edification ….. but not today!When I first came to the US some 30+ years ago, I found a model of an old geezer sitting in a rocking chair wrapped in a tartan rug and smoking a pipe. It had the caption “Tomorrow, I gotta get organized!” I took it back to the UK and gave it to my father back then. He has since passed but I’m now thinking that my children could justifiably now give that model to me!
Sounds like a good idea.
I think it might be better if the badge and ranking number were only visible when clicking on the user. Public visibility gives that feel of a ‘club’, and we all know Woody Allen’s view about clubs 🙂
Kudos to Daniel … it already started working. 73 … sorry… 75 comments within an hour of posting.R we looking at some record break?
This comment is so I can see what my rank is. I need to know.
I’m only Top 50. Maybe that’s just right for an AVC “irregular”.
I’m not sure I like this for this community. I view this as a classroom, not an arcade or a competition. I’m implementing similar features on our website so I’m not against them, just in the right context. I feel it might cheapen the discussion, make more noise to filter through, and discourage quality. It also might cause someone to discredit a great opinion because it comes from someone low in the rankings or “like” someone else’s simply bc they already have a high ranking. Might be great on other disqus communities, but I’m not sure about it on this one.
Kelly — I’m still processing all this myself, but I do think this is one community that can handle something like this. I’d be really surprised if in this particular community someone would be discounted because of ranking. I don’t think the badge gauges the value of someone’s ability to make a valuable or meaningful comment or contribution, but rather reflects the contribution made over time. Maybe this gauges how much someone helps to set the tone for the community or even helps it to BE a community.I honestly don’t think my comments are all that fantastic. Maybe every once in a while, I say something particularly interesting. But I am committed to making a contribution because I really value what happens here. Maybe that is what my ranking reflects. To be honest, I am a little surprised at some of the names that do not have a “badge” next to them because they are people whose voice I really appreciate.I’m always glad when you show up!
Well said Donna.
Speaking of features, why isn’t DISQUS linked into Klout score yet? Logically, Disqus activity totally should bump up Klout.I’ve been investing far less time into Disqus recently and more into Twitter in order to up the Klout score. Just sayin’. Daniel needs to get that aligned. If for no other reason than to boost my Klout. 🙂 mwahahaha
Someone puh-leez LIKE this comment — it’s brilliant!!!
this is exactly the kind of bogus activity this new disqus feature, kluot, and the like will encourage.
I agree with Charlie: I think this is amusing rather than something to game.It’s like counting and worrying about how many twitter followers one has or clicks on one’s web-site devoid of any cash transaction taking place. If no incoming cash results, who cares what one’s Klout or follower count may be unless your sole goal is to be a social butterfly hub hoping to score serendipitously through gaining incidental income from affiliate marketing results?I’ve personally never been impressed by, or desired to have, plaques and/or awards for performance: Cash or equity gains on the other hand …. now your talking my language. 🙂
ME DID.
Your wish is our command Tereza!~ anything to support a good joke but yet, in this case, you’re comments are typically worthy and I have “liked” many of them over time so I’ll include this one as well for good measure. 🙂
i’m pretty skeptical about Klout scores. they don’t seem very accurate
ME, GRIMLOCK, CONFIRM THIS OPINION.@KLOUT MOSTLY SIGNIFY NOTHING.
Not everyone knows this. I don’t know this. But that doesn’t mean anything — really (I’m not being self-effacing).I’d be interested to hear why you say this.Anyway what could it hurt to have Disqus activity reflected in Klout score?
I’d be interested in knowing why you are skeptical.
You’ve hit on something here.While Disqus is a wire frame for community on the web, it sits extant from Klout yes, but more bothersome, it needs some SEO focus. Lots of interesting, keyword rich content, very little SEO connections.
In regards to your “The developer and the blogging community is pining for a relationship with Disqus.” thought (max threading level doesn’t allow direct reply) I find this intriguing. Anything specific in mind?
Hi Tyler…I have a bunch of specific ideas.And the 306 comments here from Fred’s 251 word post aren’t about the typographical problems of the black rankings box. This is excitement about Disqus surfacing a smidgen of the the interest graph data that is rising under these discussions.This, to my eye, is about how and why to surface and use that information. How to display it. Who should control it.Shoot me your contact info ([email protected]) and I’ll jot down some things. Trying to get out to see the team in your new digs in early September and would be glad to discuss.
Erh, Arnold; It’s now 346 comments and counting :)But I totally agree with you.Rev 1: As of 03:37 PM PDT on 08/23/11, steam has now reached 430 comments. Amazing how these threads grow.
Peter…really nice to hear from you. Been too long.
Thank you Arnold. Always my pleasure to connect with you through whatever medium may be the active one of the day.
While technically there is no limit to the number of replies that can be added at the same level as each other to any particular comment, the overall downstream “depth” or “length” or “total number of successive replies” in a contiguous succession of replies in a reply thread hanging below a comment is a DISQUS attribute settable by the thread/blog owner.When the depth set in the configuration has been reached, the option to “Reply” directly in the thread no longer appears as can be seen in many examples in this stream.However, all is not lost: If you want to reply to a comment that has reached the end of the option to Reply directly, then the way around the limitation is to email your reply. If you have set up your own access to any DISQUS comment stream to have “email notification of new comments” sent to you when new comments are added, then use this notification to email your comment back to DISQUS as a reply to the relevant “notification” that has been emailed to you.Hope that helps anyone who meets this challenge and did not know about this option; but of course Tyler, you know about this given who you are, right? 🙂
A few thoughts for disqus (all of which they certainly know):Of course, these metrics are only for engagement in *comments*, not in the *blog* itself. Feedreader consumption won’t enter in at all. If I feedread a post but don’t jump into the actual post to comment or at least read comments, that’s not counted. Maybe that’s just fine since this is a measure of community engagement rather than consumption.Going with a gaming strategy is an excellent way, I’m guessing you’re learning from foursquare and others. Just make sure you’re reinforcing quality behavior– looks like you are re the signals listed above.Upon posting my last comment, no box appeared, then I refreshed and it did.Speaking of ‘ranks’: still hoping for ranking of the post itself. At least being able to flag it “Best of AVC”, etc.
My feedback would be to let the owner of the blog set how it would look.I.e. you could keep the current badge with the number. Although that turns me off, maybe it would really work in some communities.Or you could say top 50 get this icon (you set the icon) Top 100 that icon etcMake it configurable by the blog owner. The next step is to let the blog owner actually configure the ranking algorithm.More importantly though, fix the firefox bug where when you write a comment it doesn’t scroll.
i agree with this commentthis is how i’d configure it if i had the control to do that
Would you then publish the configuration you have come up with to assign icons. If transparency is something that is touted then sharing how you rank people commenting or the ranking methodology may be something people would want to know. So they can see that doing “x” gains them a point or gets them no score etc..My view is such things are more a gimmick than anything else. People especially on this blog have for the minimum an IQ greater than the sum of the digits that make up their age. Therefore for most of us , we know what we like or don’t about a certain comment or commenter.Shall see how transparent this rating engine is.
My point would be to make it easy to see who the owner of the blog values.I don’t mean this in a bad way.Probably the best thing disqus did is to put in user icons.If I’m doing a quick skim reading I can stop at the people I know. That doesn’t mean I don’t value anybody less, but its natural human nature to try and parse.You don’t want the rating engine transparent because in this case you will hurt feelings, and people can game the system.. I would have a feature where a blog owner could put people up into the high ranks or knock people down (just like casino’s or restaurants do for stars) but not put it in the face of the regulars.For instance Fred could rank Brad Feld highly even though he doesn’t comment here very much.Rating engines should be transparent where people are spending actual money to hit different levels. Think of loyalty programs (which we do) like airlines.
“For instance Fred could rank Brad Feld highly even though he doesn’t comment here very much.”This kind of thing would please the lurkers…uhhh, that would be me.
you comment pretty often don’t you jon?
@fredwilsonI read here nearly every day ;-)and I try to speak whenever spoken to…
Oh – c’mon – I comment here a couple of times a week. Eek – that means I’m not a regular!
I can call out a Spring Creek Elementary alumni.
it would be interesting to see how you rank in other communities too
i would be transparent if i could be. i don’t know exactly what tools disqus will provide publishers/bloggers
i totally missed this thread. love gamification principles but hate things like this community rank. Rank is the antithesis of a healthy community IMO. I hated Tumblr’s system (that they got rid of) and I hate this. It’s grade 7 all over again.
Leigh, as you may have gleaned from my other comments in this thread, I think it is a big mistake and distraction to treat ranking as a serious issue but rather look on it as completely incidental relative to one’s own desire to contribute input of value to a comment thread: in other words, ranking has ONLY the meaning that YOU give it for you. I doubt any of us commenting here ever see our rank from a competitive standpoint – at least, I trust that is the case. Content relevance and value contribution should always trump gaining rank! Sent from my Verizon BlackBerry via BES on XO hosted Outlook.
No matter what we’d like to believe – ‘ranking’ has a value – rank implies Social Capital – I wish content relevance trumped other things but I work in digital marketing where experts spring up like mushrooms on a dewy morning — do they get ignored? Quite the contrary. More to the point – as I posted in another comment on this thread – i think putting competitive systems in supportive env. is a bad idea – in a blog post i quoted the Yahoo Pattern library – i think their comment is bang on:”When a new or existing community requires a reputation system, the designer must pay careful consideration to the degree of competitiveness the community ought to exhibit. Haphazardly introducing competitive incentives into non-competitive contexts can create problems and may cause a schism within the community.”(link here: http://developer.yahoo.com/…
Thank you Leigh. I like your feedback and understand your point of view: I think you make some very good points. That being said, for me at least, I do regard this ranking as a hoot not to be taken as a stimulus to become competitive for the sole excuse of building rank. I’ll stand or fall on whether or not my peers see my content to be worthy of attention or not: that alone is good enough for me. Sent from my Verizon BlackBerry via BES on XO hosted Outlook.
Currently looking at a possible solution. We know about the issue. It’s a mix between AVC using the !important rule, and our height on the iframe being inline (making it impossible for users to set a custom style w/out using !important) a catch-22 to be sure.Going to play around with some possible solutions today, but have no fear, your concerns are heard!
Could you also not let the User decide if they want the badge showing or not? Perhaps for the more humble users? Not saying that would be me. 😉
I would like a control panel with knobs and sliders to tweak these parameters, automatically syncing the ranking table.That’s very useful for fine tunning the experience visually, with less iterations and less trial and error.
I’d go one step further and enable the blogger to create their own scoring algorithm. Different blogs may want to promote specific types of activity – engagement, high likes, new commenters, etc.
They won’t be able to create their own algorithm, too tough, but they can let the blog owner configure it……vuz hit it nail on..
I can already hear developers at Disqus hating you!
What about uniforms?
Hahahahahaha, the funny thing is that most folks want to eliminate all forms of ranking and uniforms is just the next step.This reminds me of the convention of awards for valor and campaign ribbons in the military.When you report into a new unit, you usually wear your Class A uniform with all ribbons. In the day, you could only travel in Class As, today the exception is for soldiers going to and from a combat theater of operations.You could look at a guys ribbons and know where he had been and what he had done. If you had a Ranger tab and jump wings and a CIB (combat infantryman’s badge) all the better.I used to have a friend who wore only a single row of ribbons — seemngly quite lightly “decorated” — which was quite unimpressive until you got up close and realized that they were the Silver Star with oak leaf cluster (2nd award), the Bronze Star w. V device for valor and the Soldier’s Medal (lifesaving in a combat theatre). Combined with a CIB, a Ranger tab, a Master Blaster set of jump wings, a Pathfinder insignia and a SF combat patch.If you could “read” his ribbons, you knew he was quite a soldier.Once a girl at a bar asked a Jarhead — who had a lot of “been there” badges because, face it, they go a lot of places — why he had so many more ribbons than my friend. The poor Jarhead had to explain that all my friend’s ribbons were for heroism and his were for perfect attendance.
Thanks for that..really interesting.
There should be some kind of award for going through and surviving business disasters. Ones where you crawl out of the smoking wreck and only later figure out what happened.
Honestly, I think this feature would be far more useful for internal usage. Communities are not games, you can get hurt a lot by losing your community.I also think that it may be better to tag people with high ranks with helpful community titles (so that newbies know who is there to help), and give them access to certain features faster than others (like, spamwatching).Then again, I’d happily trade my score to make someone else feel happier here…Also, I know its been mentioned before: but I am way too young for reading glasses, and I’m having a hard time reading the font you chose….
So I get extra points for shouting “FIRST”? Hmm.
Time when one comments should not be considered as a weight.As for ranking one’s comments seems like scoring badges on something else. Is commenting now part of the bigger “game mechanics ” being part of everything , supposedly stating you use that term in your platform is the new buzzword.Personally I don’t see value in this ranking system, I think the community has a way to pay attention to people who comment /engage with one another here or elsewhere. A algorithm however fair as it maybe will not be fair to those not ranked or ranked improperly in their view.Trying to defend the rank will motivate some to tailor the way they interact.It is possible to keep a rank for yourself and reveal only to you, but not share with rest of the community. I doubt people like to have their grades revealed to anyone else in a class, and this blog is like a classroom with the people who read and contribute to the health of the blog may feel restricted in expressing themselves if their rank is revealed to their peers. It may well feed into treating one as a pariah based on their rank.I am going to come back with a more cogent set of thoughts around this.
Agreed. If one is posting out of passion, great. If to score points, that seems risky. I currently enjoy both the posts and the comments here just the way they are. Don’t need rankings to tell me who is who.
well the Fridays that you don’t post about new features will be known as featureless Fridays…I don’t like Top 25 etc. It doesn’t engender community to my mind. It’s ranking. I’d prefer to see some other description and rating of community engagement. Liad’s comment is spot on.The AVC community is the only internet community I actively take part in. The people here are awesome.It’s ironic that on the day I get a hat tip (thanks Fred) it’s at a time when I am not able to interact and Disqus this new feature.The one (and only) RichardF
I know the feeling about not having sufficient time / ability to spend.
there will be time. this feature, in some form, will be around for a long time
This is a tremendous new feature for Disqus. I’ve been a long time user on my sites, and have recently been thinking about ways to incorporate reputation rankings as part of the long term value within a community. Maybe the system can provide some flexibility so that the owner can value activities differently.
I’m still wondering why the comments have to show up as PST the east coast. It makes you appear to be writing at 3am sometimes with people making comments in the middle of the night. It wasn’t even immediately obvious when I started reading the blog what was going on. I don’t think that’s helpful to new commenters.
I may have dropped off the top 1,000,000. lets see. 😛
58
Pleasantly Surprised. Past commenting karma pays back. 🙂
Where have you been?
Took some time to figure out next steps of my career. Needed to get away from thinking about startups……..
Hope all is well…
Yup. Things are finally settling down. I’m joining Yahoo’s Product Management team on Mon. 🙂
That’s fantastic! Congratulations!
Thanks. 🙂 Hope everything is going great. I’ll probably be more visible on avc going forward.
Damn. I’m going to have to start commenting more often.
See, this is what worries me. The quality of comments and community here is quite high and people commenting just to juice their scores is a worrisome idea.
We’ll see.(And hey, I was mostly kidding.)
Au contraire, mon frere! 🙂 PEG is a terrific commenter. So if this reminds/incents him to show up more — I think that’s a good thing. Kind of like the bar having a Happy Hour special.Bottoms up!
I usually like to post a thought out response, but in this case my thoughts are not clear. However, I got a negative FEELING about the feature when I read your post. The idea of judging people for various behaviors can create all sorts of weird unintended consequences.
Really interesting to see the impact of this… both initially and how it changes over time. Will disqus give you data on that Fred as the blog owner… or maybe as “the One”? Speaking of rank, that data might also be useful to the “top 25” or those that are actively #tummeling your community.
i’ve had this data for a while now. it is part of disqus analytics
Interesting idea. But what is the utility? Regardless of how the ranking is determined, what might I find useful about rankings?
ideally to know which commenters have developed the strongest voices in the community
Not only is it simply ranking .. but a reputation score as well. If members of a community indicate that they value another member, that’s a very powerful statement.
Simply commenting the most doesn’t mean the person is any more insightful. The word ‘rank’ connotates that the loudest most frequent person is probably the best person to look to yet the correlation between activity and insightful might be muddled at best. If you want a rank, do it based on the number of Likes. If you want an activity measure, call it ‘Most Active’.Algorithms are messy and arbitrary. Let the site owner decide what the most important measure is to them and let them decide what to display.
JLM is far from the loudest. but he’s earned his #1 position
I’m not sure about that Fred, I mean come on – his whole name is in CAPITAL LETTERS. 😉 Hehe.. He’s screaming attention whore before he even starts typing. ;PI kid. <3 JLM.
ME SEE WHAT YOU DO THERE.
No offense intended towards you adopted father!!
NONE TAKEN. CAN TELL, BECAUSE YOU STILL ALIVE. ‘<
I SAY IF THE OVERSIZED FOOTPRINT FITS, STEP IN IT.Really, @FakeGrimlock:disqus is your adopted father? Now, that’s a story.
spit up water reading this one.
Me too Mark
JLM is a commenting virtuoso.
awful idea. commenting activity online is already down due to the disappearance of anonymity (as you yourself pointed out last week), and now you want to highlight highly ranked people and discourage the non-klout hungry folks even further from engaging? it puts the barrier of entry so high that most people won’t feel like anything they say matters. doesn’t sound too smart to me, but what do i know.i read you blog everyday, fred, and i’ve just launched a start-up trying to give legitimacy to anonymity and do away with all this (what i perceive to be) nonsense; as such, i wish i was in your commenting inner circle so i’d have a hope of you paying attention to what i write here. but if i was too disinclined to jump in with all the folks vainly trying to sound smart in front of you before, i’ll certainly be way too intimidated to do it with this new disqus feature. “i’m not ranked, so no one will give me the time of day… screw it” will be the thought going through many a person’s head, not just mine. and then you’ll miss out of whatever goodness those people may be able to add to this community and/or you personally.
that’s not right. i reply to the comments that jump out at me. rank has nothing to do with the comments i focus on.
Part of his point though too is that you won’t see many comments because of the flood that sometimes exists; I put more in my comment to him with a potential solution to this..
i read every comment. i am doing that now on a post that is a few days old
I would disagree with that. I’ve commented maybe five times and received a reply from Fred three times. And we’ve never had any interaction anywhere else. *edit* I just checked. I’ve commented seventeen times. But the fact that I don’t remember that implies they weren’t great comments.
I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad.. the dreams in which you comment anonymously is the most irony I’ve ever had.Why are barriers to entry hard? It’s a filter system. And that won’t stop everyone from just trying, it will redirect them to where they need to be, where they are ready to be in that moment; Whether that’s finding support or trying to get involved in regular discussions.Fred’s inner commenting circle, only one person needs to read it in order to respond – and to perhaps ‘Like’ it.So really you’re just highlighting a gap that exists, for the ‘lost in the mix’ that perhaps all of those who feel they’re ‘outside of Fred’s circle’ can browse and support eachother, where the highlighted / top comments aren’t the same; It’s not a need to change anything, it’s a need to add more.Although is that perhaps worse to do? I don’t know..P.S. Are they trying to sound smart or are they smart? Perhaps you think this similarly because you put actual value/self-worth to a “Top 10” ranking – when in fact that’s not where a person’s self-worth comes from at all. Some people who have an inflated ego will disagree..
the whole point of ranking something is to assign a value to it; and with a ranking being linear, the things at the top are by default declared better than the things at the bottom. but now the “things” are people, and that’s where this new disqus feature, klout, etc. all get a bit dicey.you say a person’s self-worth doesn’t come from a ranking, but if you’re not going to let it affect how you judge someone’s worth, then why have the ranking in the first place? you say it’s just a filter, but what is that filter based on if not algorithmically computed self-worth? you say that implications of worth won’t discourage people, but a trip back to an intro to psych/sociology/communications college course should quickly make you remember why that’s incorrect — it’s just human nature.fyi, anonymity doesn’t mean the absence of critical thought. it means the absence of me needing to temper that thought in such a way that i’m trying to boost my worth, no matter if it’s disqus ranking or fred wilson brownie points.
seems like a cool idea and puts some structure around what the regulars around here would “know” from hanging out here. Of the signals being used in the algorithm, I’d hope “likes” within the community are given heavy weight…and this may influence how people here dole out likes, etc.
Like the Badge idea. 1st Impression would be to make the font on badge and the hover pop-up more readable for those of us with more mature eyes.Like the Feature Friday idea as well.
The new feature is what it is. In this small sample size, it’s not really improving my experience, but it’s not hurting it either.The reality is I don’t read comments on every blog or publisher. With few exceptions, people who visit and comment on sites like AVC have already been pre-qualified in my mind. Whether you are a top commenter or whether you are primarily a lurker (like me), if you take the time to comment on this blog, I’ll gladly listen to what you have to say.This feature might have a bigger use case on a publication that has a wider audience range, but then again, I generally don’t read comments at these places. Who has the time or energy to read comments on places like Huffington Post? Not me — and the ranking of those comments won’t drive me to start reading them now…My 2 cents anyways.
Instead of a linear Top 5, Top 10, etc., you should have badges that label what people actually are. I, for example, read every day, but rarely comment. I could be “lurker”, “stalker”, “creepy guy with a browser”, or “faithful reader”. Other tags could be “thought leader” (for people who get many likes), or “engaged” (for people who reply a lot).Consequently, I’m amazed at the level of engagement of top commentors, including Fred. I rarely comment because I’m sheepish about throwing something out there without rationalizing it against all other comments. This post falls in that category, and is therefore probably duplicated multiple times throughout the entire thread.
disqus was playing around with that approach a few weeks agonew commenters were called noobs
Are they going to run with it? If they know I’ve read every post for the last year and a half, there’s a more descriptive word than noob.
FNG
Was this an inside joke?
or even a “welcome” badge for new commenters would be nice
That’s good.
Fred goes out of his way to welcome anonymous/new commenters when he catches them. I used to do the same when I was “very” active in the comments.Actually a message from Disqus about brand new commenters on posts would be handy to bloggers (to be filtered by our emails).
Well, there you are! Your absence from this particular convo was palatable.Noticed you’ve been scarce lately, anyway. But so have I until a few days ago. Hope all is well.
I’m still around, but on a time lag. I try to hop in once or twice a week (often weekends) to catch up on comments. I also took a break from daily blogging and am reworking my social web flow.
BTW, I specifically remember you as one of those people who welcomed me in early on — as well as doled out the “likes” to my tentative comments.I have found that many of you in the Top 10 are not only people who add valuable content but also add significantly to AVC hospitality. Not one Top 10 ranking has been a surprise.Thank you, Mark.
I don’t have as much welcome ammo as I used to, but I still try to say hi and welcome new folks and perspectives. Admittedly I sometimes just catch up with what’s happening with the AVC community via the disqus website, although I can’t filter by blog so I get a mix of reactions and responses all over the web.
That’s why this place reminds me of Cheers
Me too, all those Mark’s likes made me feel great!
Test to see if past commenting helps.
yup
To be honest, these rankings aren’t doing anything for me. All the top people already had my respect from their contributions over time. Also, once we are getting into the Top 250 or 500, I’m not so impressed (granted I am not even in that club, not that I’m bitter, OK maybe a little, but it’s my own fault for lurking so much).Having said that, I can see how stats like this are very useful to Fred (or maybe The Fred, is that better than The One?). Initial impressions. Will definitely keep an open mind as the experiment continues.
what if i changed “top 50” to “the entourage”, top 250 to “the regulars”, top 1000 to “hangers on”, etc, etc
I’d appreciate your personal touch on the titles, and even more your ability to tune the dials to fit the community.
Hmm. Re-labeling the rankings to be more tongue-in-cheek gives you a fun way to identify the different strata of people. Also probably makes it less imposing for a new person than having the number rankings. However, I still wonder what the purpose of the rankings is. Using the “you get what you measure” principle (to paraphrase Drucker), is that supposed to encourage people to comment more often just to get ranked? And does that encourage quantity over quality?Actually, changing my tune from my original comment, I think this does make me want to comment more. Not sure that is good for everyone else, though.
Oh, and I like the name change to Bartender. Well chosen.
Its our bar. I just pour the drinks
Although at first glance it also looks “gardener”
That’s exactly what I thought it said also.Sent from my Verizon BlackBerry via BES on XO hosted Outlook.
that works too
With this Disqus ranking system, men, watch out! Why am I reminded of “Win us with honest trifles in order to deceive us in deepest consequence?” or the story of the Trojan Horse?Or, to start, the men here should understand that on average they are heavily interested in technology and/or business and are much less interested in the humanities and the social. Or, the men are ‘socially challenged’ nerds and/or money-focused businessmen.In contrast, there are common suggestions that ‘social media’ is much more for females than males.For more, I can’t speak for other nerds interested in making money, but I still remember middle school: Gotta tell you, in the ‘social competition’, the girls were ahead. Not just a little ahead but WAY ahead, and not just ahead of us nerds but of nearly all the boys. We’re talking the totally hopeless against the totally dominant.Net, in the early years, year by year, the girls are MUCH more ‘mature’ socially than the boys and have MUCH better social skills.So, was it just me or just my school? So it can be good to get some confirmation and explanation, e.g., from:Deborah Tannen, ‘You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation’, William Morrow and Company, New York, ISBN 0-688-07822-2.Yup, not a doubt: In social maturity and skills, and verbal skills, the girls totally blow away the boys. The difference is HUGE.Yes, I confess: Although only happenstance and not a pursued objective, it was a sweet victory starting in the ninth grade in math and physical science and then computing where, all the way to the present, there were very few females around to present competition! It did seem that the females wanted to major in the social sciences and humanities and not math, physical science, or engineering.One of the sweetest victories: In middle school there was a girl, Eleanor Ann Harriet, “Ann”. Like many in middle school, since grade school she was suddenly ASTOUNDINGLY pretty, beyond belief. So I tried and failed. I was about as skilled and effective as a drunk with mittens trying to play Bach on violin. Five years later, in the 12th grade in math class, there was a tricky question, and I had a shoot-out at the board with the best student in the grade and won. I just thought that my math was correct. It was. No biggie.But ‘word’, although not at all from me, spread quickly in the halls between classes, and Ann came up, stood close, and said: “I heard about what you did in math class.”. Yup, that was the time to invite her for a Cherry Coke after school and walk her home, but from the failure in middle school, with the pains still fresh, I was too slow to see the big turnaround and opportunity.Gee, some girls could think that doing some math would be ‘attractive’? Who would’a thought?Yes, later I discovered that some of the really nice girls understood that boys their age were, for them, out’a the picture but took a sympathetic ‘sisterly’ attitude!Okay, men, with this Disqus ranking system, we have to guess that it will be middle school again where the males lose out.Okay, that guess can be taken as a ‘hypothesis’ to be tested. How might we do that? How about a little “applied probability”? Or from Dr. Wegner at Union Square is:”As it turns out, one of the subjects I am passionate about is the importance of understanding probability and how it should be considered in all our decision making.”So, let’s try an hypothesis:The ranking system does not affect posting frequency of females.To test this, let’s look at posts from some females both historically and for this thread. For females we can consider, say, just Tereza and ShanaC. Even without doing much number crunching, I see at present on this thread out of 182 posts 41 instances of string “Tereza” and 10 instances of string “ShanaC”.I would ‘reject’ the hypothesis!Men, with the Disqus rankings, you are about to be hit hard enough to have your socks knocked off! Thought middle school was tough; you ain’t seen nutten yet!Okay, here’s another hypothesis:Gender plays no role in Disqus rankings.So, let’s test this hypothesis. As I hover over ShanaC, I see “17,944 placement 3” and for Tereza, “20,710 placement 4” out of something over 500 ranking positions.Again, even without doing the detailed number crunching, I would ‘reject’ the hypothesis!Men, yes, I know that the females are sugar and spice and everything nice; and I especially appreciate the ‘social graces’ of ShanaC and Tereza on AVC.com; and men have natural ‘protective’ emotions for females; but these “honest trifles” are about to be a Trojan Horse!Men, you’ve fought hard for decades for competence in technology and business and worked your way up from the middle school disasters and now with the Disqus ranks the females, in this case just two, are about to turn nearly all of us into something comparatively worse than middle school clueless, inarticulate, mumbling, drooling, untied shoes, torn, stained homework papers, with half of lunch on the front of the shirt, hopeless nerds!Men, while we still have our hands on the software and still a little hope, fading fast, turn off the rankings! Otherwise, we ain’t got even a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue of a long shot chance! We’re about to lose it all, something over 500 men blown away by just two women!If we want a change, then let’s borrow from some of what we had in high school and vote on the AVC.com cheerleaders with short skirts, high kicks, and big pom poms! It’s about our only hope! Remember what the girls did to us in middle school!You have seen what just two women can do! Think of what thousands of women could do? Millions of women? In the world there are at least three BILLION women! Us meager few hundred or few hundred thousand men could be reduced to servile drones under the sharp heels of billions of domineering women eager for retribution, without hope of redemption, for years of real or imagined male transgressions!Nerds of the world unite! Else you will lose your gains!Then when I get the rest of my software written, maybe some woman will be nice and let me buy her a Cherry Coke!
Thank you for the lovely complement.
My post was supposed to be funny, but you and Tereza are definitely totally blowing away nearly every man on AVC.com!Partly I was teasing you and Tereza and guessing that you would be good sports, which you seem to be, but both of you definitely deserve big complements!The fraction of women in NerdLand is tiny, and nerds need more women around, but you and Tereza are not just ‘Two Travelers in NerdLand’ but are showing up nearly all the men! Amazing!
I only have two rules about being teased -no hair or fish jokes.Oddly, I feel intimidated at times by the people here…so I would say thank you once again…
“I feel intimidated at times by the people here.”.Short suggestion: F’get about it!Longer explanation: As we all know well, the main focus at AVC.com is Internet startups with ‘large networks of engaged users’. There can be connections with ‘social graphs’ and ‘interest graphs’ and more. ‘Virality’ from ‘social’ effects, e.g., fads, cliques, in-groups, publicity, what’s popular or ‘in style’, can be important.One of the main challenges in such work is just, what the heck will “engage” a few hundred million Internet users?Given a good answer, that is, more certain than just good luck, the technical part is assumed to be doable and maybe even routine. Given the power of the Internet, computing, software, and software tools, what is just ‘routine’ can cover a lot of possibly valuable utility.So, for nearly all the cases considered, the main challenge in such a business is actually not the technology. Indeed, such technology is pursued much more deeply on, say, Hacker News than at AVC.com. E.g., since my server farm needs some ‘asynchronous’ work among ‘communicating sequential processes’, at Hacker News today I paid close attention to the ‘duality’ between ‘threads’ and ‘events’. I concluded: I can have a nicely strong business and, then, plenty of resources to address that ‘duality’ before I need to! Ah, technical judgment in action for the business!Instead, again, for nearly all the ‘business ideas’ of interest here, the main challenge is just what the heck will “engage” a few hundred million Internet users. So far, heavily we talking the ‘social Web’.But, ‘social’ is not nearly ‘gender-neutral’: It isn’t just teasing the girls to note that way back there, middle school and before, the girls were already MUCH better at social insight than the boys. MUCH better. And mostly the boys, as men, never caught up. And given that in the ‘social Web’ likely significantly more than 50% of the ‘engaged’ users are female, in understanding what would work in the ‘social Web’, females have another advantage.The advantage is so clear and so strong that in my startup I am avoiding it! I am trying to provide a solution to a problem where, even if significantly more than 50% of my users will be female, still the users’ interest is not primarily ‘social’. I’m hoping that millions of users will regard the problem as important enough and my solution good enough that a strong ‘social’ role won’t be necessary. I’m not betting my business on my insight into ‘social’!So, net, for much of the core of the content of AVC.com, the women here have some significant advantages. And it shows in the numbers. Us nerd, geek men, if we had that much ‘self-understanding’, which is questionable, are the ones who should be “intimidated”!Net, on this playing field, you are ahead and winning and stand to continue to be.”Intimidated”? F’get about it!
Awww, Siggy, you are too funny. I am truly flattered.That’s coming from the girl who hung out with the Dungeons + Dragons boys. They were the nicest, smartest, and always made me laugh.And what’s cooler than a guy who cracks the big problem in front of the whole class?What I will observe is that the female commenters are a tad bit more likely to respond and interact to other commenters. It’s a little less natural for some guys to do that. But that interaction builds relationships. It’s important and community-building.My view of an awesome future is boys and girls working on problem sets together. Math and science needs a bit more social challenge and interest for the girls to keep their lights on. The way it’s taught today is boring for them.The US is the only place I know where guys play big sports and girls are their cheerleaders. And those are the popular girls and their social status comes from looks not brains. That’s just structurally wrong. And the downstream effect is angry women who feel they’ve not been paid attention to for anything other than their short skirts. To me the plane that pendulum swings on is just wrong.Boys need help, girls need help. Different kinds of help. And they can help each other. So boys gain confidence with girls, and by working with them grow their social skills (eye contact, etc.). And girls get more confidence in math/science and really appreciate the smart boys in action. Why can’t we all just get along??? That’s the goal, n’est-ce pas?Oops — just noticed the time. My geek husband is waiting for me to join him on the couch for a snuggle. It’s Frisky Netflix Friday, after all.
“To me the plane that pendulum swings on is just wrong”Yes.”Why can’t we all just get along???”Yes, the nerd boys need more girls around.I was going to do two posts on this thread but did only the one about how well two females are doing at AVC.com. While the situation is surprising, and able soundly to reject various hypotheses of no female effects, for this nerd having two capable females around helps the ‘community’.My second idea was less well formed but something about some ‘reinforcing, self-filtering’ effect of AVC.com: So, nearly all the people who come here are people interested in the content and somehow that results in some especially good content.Then maybe part of why there is the small female fraction on FredLand is that for only some rare females does the content have “interest for the girls to keep their lights on” or some such. Then to explain the surprisingly high female ‘rankings’, there is your “What I will observe is that the female commenters are a tad bit more likely to respond and interact to other commenters.”. But I have to suspect that there is still more going on.So, here’s one ‘application’: In ‘user contributed content’, how to get high quality? My view is that in most Internet fora the quality is really low, same for most of Reddit, higher for Hacker News, and much higher for AVC.com. So, what is the ‘pattern’ so that can predict what forum topics or what ‘interests’ in the ‘interest graph’ will result high quality user contributed content?”Join him on the couch for a snuggle”: When my wife was alive, I got her a pile of absurdly long, full, thick, flannel, traditional Lanz very warm night gowns with some fuzzy slippers to keep her feet warm for such activities! When we were in grad school, each Saturday night one TV station showed Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan movies; Sara Lee had some orange cake with some great, intense orange flavor; and we’d get a plastic mop bucket with 10 pounds of ice and chill a bottle of Italian sweet sparking wine, ‘Asti’, and enjoy!I’ve lost track of Eleanor Ann Harriet; else when my software runs I’d invite her for a Cherry Coke!
Sorry to hear about your wife Sigma.I wonder how the disqus community signal tool will handle your comments? Each is a full blog post in of itself, always well thought, and ready for feedback.
“Sorry to hear about your wife Sigma.”Thanks.It was a big surprise: Her father had been a Captain in the US Army, was a natural leader of men, and of many young men, in the community, was on the school board, the bank board, several other boards, built his house and farm buildings over 90% from his own hands, supported his family and got all three children through college from income from less than 100 acres of farm land, was head of an important business, and, in the industry, rising quickly in local, state, and national politics. Helping a neighbor stuck in the snow, he died of a heart attack.One his Board lessons: Let everyone else have their say and, at the end, make a careful comment that moves the deadlock as desired!His wife was a pure example of Otto von Bismarck’s ‘Kirche, Küche, Kinder, Kleider’, that is, “what the German women do”, church, cooking, children, and sewing.The family looked like it was out of a Norman Rockwell painting of the ideal, US Midwestern family.My wife did well with piano, choir, and clarinet, won prizes in cooking, sewing, and raising chickens, as a junior starred in the senior class play (as Mama in ‘I Remember Mama’), as a senior directed the senior class play, edited the ‘Annual’, and was Valedictorian. Later she was PBK and ‘Summa Cum Laude’, won a Woodrow Wilson and two years of NSF fellowship in one award. She got her Ph.D. in essentially mathematical sociology where two of her professors were President, American Sociological Association.We lost her after a long illness.Lesson: Life can be more challenging than it might at first appear.For my posts, I just write to be clear, and, if you will, to clarify my thinking and get more clarification from feedback from others and have no idea about what Disqus will do with the posts.As I learned from my wife, if Disqus is to have a numerical ‘measure’, then in principle they should pay attention to ‘reliability’ and ‘validity’, but let’s not dwell on those! However, they might get some ideas for evaluating reliability from, say,Bradley Efron, ‘The Jackknife, the Bootstrap, and Other Resampling Plans’, ISBN 0-89871-179-7, SIAM, Philadelphia, 1982.I’ve learned a lot posting. Part of what I’ve learned is that my project looks good enough that I can mostly quit looking for things that might be wrong with it and, instead, just execute ASAP as planned.The execution has been WAY too slow, but all the ‘high risk’ work has long since been done and continued to look solid, and the rest has been just routine, although sometimes ‘routine’ mud wrestling with, say, bad software tools and bad software documentation. Also working through something over 2500 Web pages of MSDN documentation took more than one afternoon, but I won’t have to repeat that work.As you might guess from my posts, I document my code profusely, and that has proven to be a good thing: E.g., just now I’m back into the core code putting in the needed communications for the production ‘distributed application’, and the profuse documentation has been very good to have and lets me avoid “taking the same ground twice”.E.g., my SQL Server ‘schema’ is just as T-SQL statements (fast, easy, and fun to write and fun to see as a database in SQL Server) in just a text file; the file has 1305 lines with 1008 of them comments and 158 blank! Right: That’s only1305 – 1008 – 158 = 139lines for the schema for SQL Server and the rest for my reading pleasure!Right: I’m trying to start a serious business where all the data is in SQL Server with a schema of just 139 lines of simple T-SQL! Did someone mention the KISS principle of engineering?So it’s a short schema with a LOT of documentation! My view has long been that, net, the code documentation is more important than the code.The database should be efficient: All the crucial indices are ‘clustered’ for fast, nearly sequential, access. So far I’ve not needed to write a ‘transaction’, and the production work should never need a ‘join’.Also, the really intense, production work with the data is just in virtual memory, read-only, with good locality of reference, and not in SQL Server at all; so, performance should be good.Efficiency can be good to have: If soon I can serve a few dozen Web pages a second from a $1000 mid tower case at my left knee, then my business has a good chance.For the communications, I looked into several options and settled on just old TCP/IP sockets with class instance ‘serialization’ to convert to/from the communications byte strings. I just got the socket code running in Visual Basic .NET; socket code is always fun. And to test the communications software I need to add some data to my collection of test data in my SQL Server database. It’s getting there.
I’m sorry as well…
Thanks.I was trying to respond to Tereza’s “snuggle” with her husband. With my wife and I, it was Saturday night instead of Friday, with a Lanz gown for her, good for ‘snuggling’, Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan, etc. Fun times.She died not recently; by now I know I’ll never get over it.One of Buffett’s remarks is correct: Being in the US, now, is a special time. E.g., there is Moore’s law and the Internet.
siggy????oh man, you crack me up
Credit where credit is dueI stole that from JLM
naturally
AVC haiku (from 6/2010)Like me, please! Like me….Please! As much as JLM!(He sets a high bar.)
You and @JLM:disqus have the gift of helping the rest of us not take ourselves too seriously. I had a belly laugh over “Siggy” as well.
Thanks for kickstarting the convo Fred. Hey everyone, we’re appreciating the comments so far. The more positive or negative the critique, the better. We’re interested both in how it initially makes you feel (the concept) and how it is to use (our execution).No other site has this version of ranks. We may be doing different types of tests for different types of communities. We have a pretty good system powering this which lets us change stuff up fairly quickly in order to experiment.
How does longevity of comments factor into ranking?
Longevity, or length? 🙂
Brevity, please.But I was thinking if when your time line started was a factor. But, forgot that there was another comment deal before this one.
Hi Daniel,Think Benefits, not just Features. These stats shouldn’t be like Vanity stats. There is meaning behind them & the relationships they imply. Your challenge is to extract meaning and context from these numbers to benefit the community owner, the community, and the commenters. You have 3 stakeholders I think.
Daniel – on ethought, opt out for the commenter. I would order not to know and not to show. Seems I should have that right ( my comments, even though it I Fred’s blog).I am with Fred – inevitable, everlasting feature.
Just curious- did you just delete the top 25 category? it was showing yesterday, now it jumps from top10 to top50.
Yes, we’re still experimenting with ranks, and what/how-many are optimal
Would love to see more customization for ranks via Fred (as Tereza suggests).My work default blocks disqus so I miss much of the banter action these days as it happens, but I go back on weekends early AM and scan through posts and check how folks are doing.
Two reasons to post this comment:1. I want to see what my “rank” – edit – I have no rank – oh well.2. Daniel Ha will read this and hopefully fix the RSS feed feature that was disabled by the new Disqus release a few months ago. Before that I was able to subscribe to all comments of people I “followed” as well as replies to my comments in my RSS reader. After the update this no longer worked. It was a great feature an allowed me to find many new interesting blogs and conversations that people I followed had made a comment on… now you have to log in to disqus to do that…
Keep coming, Joe!
Tribe.I like it.
This is fun! For what it may be worth, the font, at least as I see it on the Chrome browser, is a little muddy/fuzzy and hard to read.
Can I put my AVC rank on my resume? 😉
i’ve seen devs do that with their stack overflow reputation
What the fuck is wrong with you people… i have been following this blog for more than 2 years… this is one of the worst comment sections i have seen.Is there something wrong with this tribe from the beginning? Or is it something wrong with the physics and maths?… as far as i know math and physics don’t morph …
are you having a bad week Kasi? you seem to be a bit agitated in your comments
Not a bad week … may be a bad quarter. Drinking a lot and interpreting things differently.Let me refrain from commenting on your site and spoiling the spirit of your blog. If possible please delete those comments i made in your blog for the last one-month. Even if i delete it will be there as guest.
Too bad the previous comment system can’t weigh in on the rankings.
you mean typepad?
Yes, I want my typepad comment mojo for the new rankings.
I imagine the goal is to enhance engagement within a community. I can see the potential. But I am not sure what it will do for quality discourse — this feature right now isn’t really about reputation. I prefer the “sort by popular” and “rating” views because you can instantly see what the community is respecting or buzzing about for that particular post.Adoption might come down to one’s goal as publisher. If my goal is to increase engagement of existing participants, this might help. Competition and pride can goose activity, but there can be negative side effects.If my goal is to keep it friendly to new commenters, I would worry about an appearance of clubbiness.I suspect there might be unintended consequences. I am trying to think of social, non-professional situations where people would want to walk around with a public ranking of some kind. I’m not sure that such a thing would help social interaction in a positive way. I would not want to see a klout score on every single tweet. But perhaps I’m being too cautious. The great thing about software is you can try and see!
Geez. I go heads down at work for a few hours & when I surface I missed all the fireworks between JLM, Tereza, Mathew, Charlie & all the others.Nobody else working on Friday in August?
I am so shocked that no one has added this to the discussion:http://www.youtube.com/watc…Not that this expresses my personal sentiment…
Watching this clip reminds me of the Foster Farms Chickens advertisements on TV …. “we’re California bred Foster Farms Chickens”! Right. 🙂
Don’t remember that one! Was referring to the “stinkin’ badges” — expressing some of the sentiments in this comment stream.
Yes, I realized that Donna.My comment arose simply from watching these rag-tag banditos in action claiming to be something they don’t seem at all likely to be and getting agitated when asked to show badges – stinkin or otherwise – to prove they are who they say they are.Seeing this skit reminded me of the Foster Farms Chickens ads which generally portray bedraggled, dirty looking chickens protesting that they are really pristine, pure-bred, healthy, clean Foster Farms Chickens ~ perhaps something is lost in the metaphor translation here or just my warped sense of humour. Perhaps once you catch one of these ads, you’ll see what I mean.
Oh, now I remember!
@DISQUS RANKING JUST MAKE ORGANIC SUBTLE THING MECHANICAL AND BLATANT.MAYBE THAT WORTH IT. MAYBE NOT.
I am not sure about the value of the badges. I want the most interesting comments to move to the top of the page. If that comments is made by a new visitor, I don’t care. I do not need to see the score, I just want to read interesting content.
After scrolling through the comments, this felt awesomely meta. I love meta.
me too
Well, I guess that means I have to start commenting now. Damn you gamification!
Will this be added later on as a tracking device for credibility etc like on Klout? Would be awesome to see it go around. I am not that active on posting on topics, maybe i need to spent more time connection and interacting rather then playing WoW and post randomly!
Ranking works for me, lets me know who the chief contributors to the community are and more importantly tells me that Disqus continues to innovate. It also does not appear invasive either, I think the little gray box looks kind of cute. So long as Facebook doesn’t acquire Disqus, Disqus rocks and forever rules :-)Disqus for me is the one platform that still has greater long-tail range. Since it has that long-tail with other blogs, the next Disqus innovation should be a measure of diversity and not just community depth. Ranking solves the vertical/loyalty interaction but there also needs to be a horizontal badge i.e 1-9, 10-25, 25-100, 100-500, 500+ for the long-tail Disqus ecosystem.I come across blogs where nobody leaves a thought trace never mind create a vibrant community and it is these wider regions which should be thought of as one Disqus family.M.
i agree
i like the ranking idea.
I see as nothing more than the acknowledgement that comments systems are better than forums for most websites….and there are some thing from the forums system people still want, like ‘rep’.The font they are using took me back 12 years to k10k and designiskinky … Never thought id see a pixel font again.
Why were my past two posts on the signonsandiego.com website flagged and deleted? I’d really like to know, thanks.
I am curious to find out why the “Like” button that precedes this input box at the head of the comment stream is not working. Has it been deactivated? There are usually at least one or two people showing as having “Liked” the post and using this feature to tweet or FB post reference to the article but in this case, no one is showing and it does not respond to my poking either.
@danielha:disqus and team — Fred invited us to share what we think and I’ve been so busy interacting that I haven’t stopped to comment specifically. Now that I have had a couple of days to get used to the new ranking feature, and to get past the initial shock, I must say that I like it very much. One of the things I like most is that it seems you have done a good job of capturing the essence of this community and translating this into an algorithm. Every potential criticism I might have had thus far has been answered by watching how this has played out. So far, the rankings have made sense experientially. For instance, the Top 10 (and #11 as well IMO) are the standouts in this community — for the value of the content they contribute, relevance, consistency, generosity, and/or reciprocity (the latter two helping to create hospitality). As much as Fred is the star here (as he should be), when he doesn’t show up in the comments for whatever reason, this group can carry the conversation pretty far.At first I was concerned that there are people whose comments and contribution have been of value or their few comments a year are especially noteworthy and yet they do not have a ranking. However, it occurred to me that higher ranking does not mean every comment is a pearl or that other commenters are less “worthy”, but rather indicates consistently and historically contributing at a certain level. I wonder how this can be communicated so that lack of a badge won’t be a deterrent? Would this be a deterrent?Anyway, this is a great effort out the gate. Very impressed. Also really like the new notifications feature (red button at top of thread). You guys truly are stars of the web world in your ongoing responsiveness and innovation.
I second this opinion.Sent from my Verizon BlackBerry via BES on XO hosted Outlook.
I’m having a hard time figuring out the point.- Improves engagement?- Improves quality?- Changes the behaviours of those who would already rank highly?It seems to me like the biggest benefit commenters will get out this system is validation of their quality across the blogs they comment on (hello Klout), and blog owners could better identify their top community members.Interesting idea but I would not be surprised to see Disqus cancel it in the long term.
I figure I would write a comment – see if I end up somewhere in the top 100!
top 50
Hmmm….I wonder what mine is. I don’t comment as much as I like but I do read the RSS feed every day and come to the site periodically. I even comment when I get the time.
Good to see Disqus rolling out something new – innovation among the 3rd party commenting tools all seem to have fallen off the radar a little.
LOL Exactly.Have to tell you — I entered the comment and nothing came up for a few moments and I almost had a heart attack: “WTF I DON’T EVEN RATE ENOUGH TO BE ON THE FUCKING BOARD???!? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?!?!”What can I say. Pathetically competitive. I am NOT suggesting that is a healthy trait. One example where Coach Jerry comes in handy.
Yeah totally. I’m embarrassed.Maybe we can have a secondary market for point DEflation.”Psst….Anyone here wanna buy some points? I’ll trade you some for an intro to Smartypants VC…” wink wink
I think it means that you would probably create a great culture at your company with a strong sense of community. Ditto for @Tereza:disqus
you aren’t the only one who had that experience. you need to hit refresh to see it. that should be fixed
Can you elaborate a bit as to where the delay came in the comment posting process? I just want to make sure I know step-by-step what you’re experiencing so we can reproduce it and fix it. Happy to help, so the more information the better. cc @fredwilson:disqus
Thank you, Jerry.I feel like….I was telling a joke. Sorta.
ha ha ha Mr. Crystle. Just trying to rankle Andy a little. I didn’t know he needed your defending! 😉
I’m looking for the “thanks – made me laugh” button … 🙂
It isn’t a bad idea… better if you could switch roles and have an argument spoofing how the person would respond as your text is under their identity.Or you could switch the identities and just stick with your normal style.Then see how long it takes for someone to notice the difference…@andyswan:disqus @Tereza:disqus
Nice one Charlie; as Sheldon might say – Bazinga!
genius
Can I pick my colour?
Sorry CC, did I miss a message?
Brilliant really. Well played!I had already begun to sketch out a “derivatives” market wherein I might slice my ranking into three tranches and securitize it with the top tranche being able to use it during certain times of the day and the other tranches being available on a “pay for play” basis and maybe a “time of day” pricing mechanism.We are after all, mostly capitalists, right?An outcry market feature, a late night discount and a reverse dutch auction — and away we go.Maybe an ability to go long or short on a commentator and a “trend” play?So, what is the opening bid, my lovelies?
I guess I’m doing something right! Only Top 50 here!Oops, this was meant on Charlie’s comment. Perhaps I’ll just post it twice.. 😉 Or I’ll just leave it here …
We’re not just both capitalists, my darling.We are Whartonites.:-+
Oh my – I’m not sure I can continue talking to either of you now…
So so true Charlie. Seems like we were just talking about this…
The developer and the blogging community is pining for a relationship with Disqus.This unrequited love will explode with just a bit of attention.
I would add my reply to this thread below Arnold’s comment but the thread Reply stream ends here with Charlie so I’ll just add ….Sounds like a market opportunity waiting to be exploited!!!Hint, hint.
Thank you Charlie. A girls can get into trouble when she forgets her winky emoticon.
I think some wacky, curveball achievements could be community-building and encourage some wackiness.As a newbie you may or may not know how tight-knit the circle is. I think there’s some reverse correlation of group-think and average age on site. As we get older we are a lot less concerned if our opinion is different. But that’s a hypothesis.When I came in I felt like I looked + smelled totally different from everyone here. And probably did. But people encouraged with responses and Likes. You develop your ‘character’.Good, interesting theater, talk shows or sitcomes requires a range of distinct, different characters who, when combined, create interesting dialog. And that’s what happens here, too. There are formulas that work and you can badge or do crowd-developed flexible recognition for great characters. (Most Contrarian, Technical Excellence, Questioning Owl, SmartAss, Rabid Republican, Flaming Feminist, The Joker, etc)
Lol. That’s what the title of the post said.
Good cast of characters there Tereza. Would you dare naming the who’s who on your list?But on a serious note, although we (let’s say the top 100) do a good job at lubricating the conversations, Fred probably revels as much with the newcomers and the Black Swans.
Absolutely — as he should!
“Fred probably revels as much with the newcomers and the Black Swans”And that is one of the things that has drawn people in. Fred’s attitude toward newcomers has set the tone for this community.Every person here — every one — was a newcomer at one point.
Fred described it correctly. I typed the comment, clicked Submit and it went live but there was no banner next to my icon above the comment. But the when I refreshed the page a few minutes later it appeared.
“Every person here — every one — was a newcomer at one point.” Well said Donna.
Slacker indeed. I wonder if I can earn the slacker badge.
Just saw it on there; that is too funny.
holy shit. i didn’t notice until just now. got a birthday present from disqus!!!
Yup Joe: You are spot on with “constant encouragement from Fred and community has helped people ‘get older faster’ (in a good way!)”, given his birthday Fred is now 1 year closer in age to me!!! Just did not realize previously that it was his blog that had enabled that achievement! {big grin}But all joking aside, I completely agree with you, Donna and Tereza.
Is it your birthday again already?Props to the title, although a bigger font would be perfect.
bop!