Sounds like a lot of manual work, nobody would want that cleanup and babysitting job, least of all active traders. When Peter says he wants the forum to self-moderate he probably doesn't mean to give everyone admin powers, what could go wrong with thatShaunWhite wrote: ↑Sun Apr 25, 2021 7:15 pmMaybe there should be an offshoots thread that becomes as ubiquitous as the Rants or Today's racing? Any side comments can be made in there, or contentious comments moved to there. That way you don't get into censorship but threads hopefully stay more on topic.
Hmm, a few things come to mind while we're on this subject again...
A flat forum model where a topic has a single thread conversation has always had issues with going off-topic since the dawn of time, so it's not a new problem but the main benefit is that it looks nice and clean.
While multi threaded forums like Reddit etc where a single topic can branch out in an infinite amount of threads and directions and where users can open or close those branches at will has a lot of versatility, but honestly looks fugly and can get pretty cumbersome.
What could potentially be interesting is something in between, for every thread to somehow be split into 2 (sub)threads, ontopic discussion and offtopic discussion, not sure how possible that would be but it would clean up the threads, particularly very large ones that are full of offtopic stuff and of users quoting massive blocks of text just to post a one liner or emoji etc. Or if every thread simply had an offtopic subthread for users that want to have a side discussion of sorts that is somewhat related to the topic, that would be equally useful.
I have no issue filtering the serious from non-serious forum posts although granted I can go from dead serious to full troll and back etc, but I imagine many people find it hard to filter stuff out, and some probably can't tell the difference at all which is far from ideal.
An upvote thingy of sorts would clearly be helpful, we wouldn't have to quote text and reply with "+1" anymore which needlessly clogs up threads as well, and newbies could see much easier how many people agree or disagree with certain posts or advice or whatever. Karmawhoring could be a slight issue here, which is when people post things just for the sake of collecting likes/upvotes/karma, but could be a small tradeoff if this will entice people to post more helpful and constructive stuff.
A downvote feature would obviously be bad for numerous reasons, those with contrarian and unpopular opinions would be reluctant to share them since they can be downvoted into oblivion and lose credibility etc which is pointless since as a trader you need to think as a contrarian, and people would just misuse the feature anyway and downvote each other based on various other reasons and not based on what a post says and so on.