Should we get rid of Facepalms?

Deijavoo

More importantly, can we not get name, address and phone number of each person that dishes out a FACEPALM sent to us as PM? 

Phil_aka_Pip

I don't even know what all the smileys are supposed to be

dindude

ddlooping said:

dindude said:

'twas referring to a few requetss in this thread for a "thanks" button. My thread above explains why I don't personally think it's a good idea. Maybe we should have a confused button.

The "confused" smiley shows that I didn't understand your argument against the "Thanks" button.
Whatever button used it's always personal, no?

Fair dos, I guess I just can't think of many situations I would use it. Whenever I have thanked anyone on the forum it is because they have done me a specific favour or given me advice on a specific problem etc. which is more personal than finding something funny and giving a LOL. But not wanting to tie up this thread much further, we can differ in opinion on this, not a prob.

Jalapeno

Deijavoo said:

More importantly, can we not get name, address and phone number of each person that dishes out a FACEPALM sent to us as PM? 

I have no idea who I've facepalmed, and most have been meant in a humorous way - can we have a list of where we committed the foul act and a chance to undo them first ?

monquixote

If we were to make facepalm instigators public I would reset all the scores to zero because it isn't fair to make something anonymous public. 

To give some context of why these buttons might be useful in the bigger picture of the forums future. Having some user driven data of peoples feelings about posts and user allows you to do some nifty stuff. 

For example: 

• Should we need new mods we could look for people with significant amounts of wisdom. 
  
• N00bs can look at a wisdom score to see if someone is likely to be talking sense when they offer advice. 
  
• Having LOL and Wow scores allows us to have an automatically generated "Best of the forum" page or an automatically generated newsletter digest of interesting stuff. 
  
• For long threads where you don't want to read it all we could highlight the most interesting funny or controversial posts. 
  

The kind of reactions we choose need to be shaped by the question: "What cool stuff could we do with this data?"

Drew_TNBD

Same excuse that Facebook and HMRC use as well, I'm sure

monquixote

Drew_fx said:

Same excuse that Facebook and HMRC use as well, I'm sure

We don't share your data with third parties. :b

Drew_TNBD

But no, seriously... the whole problem with using these to build metrics is that they are already open to interpretation and abuse - for instance, when Bertie started that thread to ask who facepalmed him, he was inundated (I took part too) in a bunch of extra facepalms... which skews the results of your metrics.

Similarly, someone who was popular from the MR days carries that popularity with them, leading to far higher chances of wisdom being awarded. Someone who was unpopular carries that with them too, leading to far higher chances of facepalms and a higher chance of someone thinking "well yeah, you've got a point there you tosser... but I aint giving you any wisdom for it!!" - again, resulting in skewed results.

Ultimately I think they should remain just a bit of fun, and not looked at as "data" as such, because the informational content is pretty low anyway.

monquixote

No way, data is teh awesomez!

Drew_TNBD

Sure it is! But it's not always useful, or even reliable enough to make the kinds of determinations you speak of. Age old debate about quantity versus quality.

monquixote

The magical thing about software is I can try it and if it's not useful I can bin it

digitalscream

Drew_fx said:

Ultimately I think they should remain just a bit of fun, and not looked at as "data" as such, because the informational content is pretty low anyway.

I this spirit, I still like my original suggestion of the admins nominating a dick of the week, who automatically gets all of the facepalms for 24hrs

Drew_TNBD

Aye, provided it isn't being printed up onto 4,000 DVD's!! (Can't wait till physical media dies)

octatonic

digitalscream said:

Drew_fx said:

Ultimately I think they should remain just a bit of fun, and not looked at as "data" as such, because the informational content is pretty low anyway.

I this spirit, I still like my original suggestion of the admins nominating a dick of the week, who automatically gets all of the facepalms for 24hrs

Stop picking on bertie.

TTony

I'm amazed (seriously) at the amount of discussion that this has generated.  And the level of analysis.  Sometimes I feel like I'm part of a sociology field study.  Perhaps we are ...

When we built theFB, the "FacePalm" option was really intended to be a bit of light relief, to signify someone saying something a little daft, but nowhere near the DBAD "flagging" level of daftness.  Yes, I said "D".

The other votes are all positives, so facepalm was to give a bit of balance, sort of like a "-1", I guess - which is how it adds into the fret scores.  Perhaps we should just title it as "-1" and not try to be clever with descriptions.  I think that was one of the suggestions made above.

We're still in early days of the forum, and after the initial bits of fun with the FacePalm option, I'd expect it to settle down and it to be used "sensibly" (ie no "how many facepalms can I collect" or "who did me, I demand to know" type posts).

My personal view is that I still think that we should have some sort of negative option for balance, largely because I think that pretty much everyone here is basically sensible and want theFB to work as a community and so it will be applied (and interpreted) sensibly.

And because I grew up in the days of Life on Mars when "things" were generally very different.

Not necessarily better, just different

 

I think we should leave it alone for a bit longer and see if usage settles down.  There are probably more important (and positive!) things that we should be exercising our minds about if we want this place to continue to grow and develop as it has done in the first week.

Bucket

I'm not too bothered about facepalms, but I think it'd be cool if (as others have suggested) they didn't detract from overall scores - so otherwise helpful or wise or funny people didn't get penalised if they posted a picture of a guitar someone didn't like, or whatever. 

I use the "wow" button occasionally but I think we'd be better served by an "agree"-type thing. Atm I use the "wisdom" button as such, when appropriate.

EDIT: Also, what's going on with the fonts? There seem to be two or three different fonts (or font sizes at least) in action while posting on here, and there's no apparent rhyme or reason to which one you'll get in your post You can see that here, in fact...

PolarityMan

I have discovered a remarkable proof that facepalms should stay that this post is too small to contain.

(Seriosuly when I post it it says my post is too long)

PolarityMan

I think that there's several ways to solve the Ambigous Facepalm Conundrum:

The first principle is that those who are frugal with their feedback ought to have the same net effect as those who are liberal. Therefore the magnitude of the delta applied to the frets score should be inversely proportional to the total quantity of frets left by that poster or more simply:

| δfretsreceived(x)| α  1/(Σ|fretsgiven(y)|)

Now it is tempting to initially presume that the magnitude of the value of each fret should be equal. However I see this as leading to inevitable inflation in fret scores. Assume for a moment that for an average poster the probabilities:

c = pwisdom(x)|wisdom| = pwow(x)|wow| = plol(x)|lol| = pfacepalm(x)|facepalm| > 0

Then, if the "value" of each fret is equal then the total expected fret score, for a total post count of n, is given by:

Efret =pwisdom(x)*n + pwow(x)*n + plol(x) * n  - pfacepalm(x) *n 

Efret =3cn -cn = 2cn

PolarityMan

Continued from above:

I think that ideally we want this to be a zero sum game, that is from a statistical point of view someone with an equal number of good posts to bad posts must have a zero fret score then we see that to balance the equation we rally need:

Efret = 0 = 3cn -3cn = pwisdom(x)*n + pwow(x)*n + plol(x) * n  - 3 * pfacepalm(x) *n 

And it follows:

 0 = pwisdom(x)|wisdom| + pwow(x)|wow| + plol(x)|lol| - pfacepalm(x)|facepalm|

So we must solve:

0 = |wisdom| + |wow| + |lol| - |facepalm|

Assuming we normalise the 3 positive frets with magnitude 1 then:

|wisdom| = | lol| = |wow| = 1 

0 = 3 - |facepalm|

|facepalm| = 3.

So clearly facepalms should be worth 3 times as much as other badges. A compelling argument to keep them in play if ever I saw one.

Roland

monquixote said:

No way, data is teh awesomez!

Drew_fx said:

Sure it is! But it's not always useful, or even reliable enough to make the kinds of determinations you speak of. Age old debate about quantity versus quality.

digitalscream said:

A high post count is a measure of how involved you are with a community - if you're doing a trade with somebody, it would mean that there's a higher likelihood that somebody on here would be able to help you get in touch should something go wrong. Even more so with the fret score.

No, it's not perfect, but it's more practical than written references and an Experian credit score.

Data is powerful when you can extract information from it, and increase knowledge on the basis of that information.  The problem is that you get what you measure, which distorts behaviour.  Some forums suffer from the "thanks for sharing" syndrome, where people post a useless comment to increase their post count.  The "like" measure tends to highlight popular posts - which is useful.  It also highlights popular people - which becomes cliquey (Is that a real word?), and can discourage debate.

My vote is to keep things really simple: 

1.  "post count" - which shows how active a user is.

2.  "like" - which shows how interesting a post or thread is, but doesn't count towards a personal score.

The fact that we so many different views about "facepalm" probably means that it's not much use to us.  It may be data, but it won't be convertible to information