On reaching level 2
Fifteen months or so after setting up this account I have, through the benefits of the
new writeup bonus system, attained the vote. I am now enfranchised.
The time has come for some minor introspection that might have some tangential relevance to the debates that seem to rage here about the future of this gloriously introspective
community.
Those who choose to read my
home node will see that I signed up for an account at the end of September 2006. About a month later, I heard through the catbox that a new
user poll was more of a new-user poll than a new user-poll. Being at that time a new account holder, I applied for a vote to spend on that poll.
kthejoker was kind enough to grant me 25, with the following message:
2006.10.20 at 15:14 kthejoker says 25 votes for you. Please use 1 for the poll, and the other 24 to spread harmony and praise.
I was true to that admonition and spent the next 14 months holding them to myself like some digitised Scrooge, reluctant to dispense a single vote, for fear it would not be used to the maximum benefit.
I was so miserly that up to the moment when on Saturday that kindly gentleman Jet-Poop had the grace to promote me to level 2 -- of which more later -- I still had four of those precious votes left.
Parsimony has become profligacy. Instead of spending 20 votes in over a year, I can spend ten votes in a day. I am now able to vote on anything I like, knowing that next day, I will have further riches to spread amongst the nodegel.
Pause a moment.
For you old hands who have comparative wealth in this respect, do not scorn the enthusiasm of the newly-enfranchised. Until a newcomer passes the pre-determined threshhold needed for the daily ration of automatic free votes, that newcomer has little idea of what E2 thinks is good and what it thinks is not so good. We spend our precious, enthusiastic, excited early days discovering by trial and error -- by painful and de-motivating error -- what all of you learned many years ago.
E2 does not like GTKY, E2 does not like leet speak; E2 does not like immature poetry; E2 does not like self-reference; E2 does not like ephemera. E2 does not like poor grammar; E2 does not like unlinked nodes; E2 does not like unformatted writeups; E2 does not like cut-and-paste; E2 is not a bulletin board. There is so much that E2 does not like, that errors are all too easy to make and I see from the catbox that newcomers make the same mistakes over and over to the point where you, wise and experienced members, bemoan the lack of guidance.
I have heard that the great and the good are studying levels and rewards. May I humbly suggest that you find a way to let newcomers know what E2 likes, before they get frustrated and angry as they write for you and only after spending time and effort on writing and contributing, do they discover the truth about what is revered and what is reviled. Maybe allow all level one members to see the vote scores of everything they visit, even if they have not voted. Maybe give them 1 vote per day. Maybe give them 10 votes per day.
However it is done, I can say this, from direct and recent knowledge. The experience of a junior member who has votes and thus can see how others have voted, is utterly different from that of a newcomer who is unable to discover what is highly rated and what is not.
It seems to me that knowing how others vote is an essential part of the E2 experience. More critically, it is an essential part of the E2 learning experience. By excluding level 1 members from this experience, you give them no reason to stay. Bear that thought in mind for a few moments.
I have to thank kthejoker a second time. I wrote a few nodes soon after joining. By the time I had written them, I did not feel the effort of writing another 20 or so was worth the uncertain rewards of gaining the vote.
Please review that last sentence. Gaining the vote was not worth the effort of writing a couple of thousand words on this small corner of the world wide web. Emmeline Pankhurst and Dr Martin Luther King must be rolling in their respective graves. There is a difference. For all its strengths, the vote on E2 is not the same as the democratic vote. Voting here does not change the government. It does not change ministers and it does not change policy. Voting here is only about showing approval or otherwise for friends, colleagues and writers.
I have heard tell of a blab box on this site, but that was not available to me as a level one. Golfur tells me it is available to me, but I cannot work out how to enable it. The explanatory link on that node is dead and there is no explanation of how it is supposed to work.
Less than 24 hours after posting this whine, the situation has been remedied. Thanks are due to Oolong and to GolFur for correcting the situation.
The reason for my second public mention of that god of gods, Kyle, is the write-up bonus. I gained level 2 with just nine nodes. I have no doubt that you have good reasons for requiring newcomers to contribute 20 or more items before you will accept them as members. Possibly you have been burned in the past by people who abused their privileges after meeting a lower requirement. Possibly it was a sensible number in the far history of this webspace. I do not know and I do not want to guess.
Inexperienced as I am on this site, it seems to me that anyone who is likely to stay in this place will understand what is required after just a few attempts, Five or six is the number that springs to mind. Probably fewer if they had more information about what gets a high score and what gets a low score. No doubt these things have been discussed endlessly by those who are much wiser and have more experience than myself. But how many of those wise, experienced senior members have come to this site with fresh eyes and seen how much you ask of a newcomer, in exchange for the most limited rights to participate. And how little information the newcomer has to guide his decisions about what to write for your pleasure and delectation.
With no reason to stay (see above), they choose to slip away, with no-one here any the wiser as to their reasons.
To return to Kyle's writeup bonus. It works. I was fortunate that I was here while it was being introduced, so I understood some of the thinking behind it. Newcomers who arrive after me will not have that benefit, and will not necessarily know to turn on the option in user settings, and more particularly, will not know what spectacular savings it offers.
I do not know how the alternative system, the Honor Roll, works. For me it offered no benefits whatsoever. Even at level 2, it offers no benefits. The writeup bonus scheme by contrast makes the effort needed to advance to level 2 acceptable. I have to wonder whether by setting the level needed for good standing so high, you are not deliberately trying to prevent people from joining. It is not my place to speculate. You are clearly all smart people and you have made your decision, and I daresay it was not made lightly. I therefore have to stand back a little from my previous experience of web-based communities here.
Beneficial though Kyle's system is, it still needs some explanation: when I wrote something that did well here (nodertising alert), the number of writeups required for level two seemed to drop, even though I did not write any more nodes. To a newcomer this is mystifying.
I now realise that the number of writeups required dropped when a node attained some arbitrary number of votes, or when a C! was awarded. But these are not writeups, or even nodes. The messages in the sidebar were confusing until I realised how things were working. But newcomers are not told any of this. They have to go to a tiny box in the settings and check a box, with no guidance or explanation, and then hope that they got the correct one.
In conclusion, I must note that when Kyle gave me those first 25 votes, there was a technical glitch with the system. I was unable to vote on the poll, even though I had votes. That glitch was sorted a couple of minutes after I drew attention to it. I was deeply impressed by that speed and flexibility of response. I learned from that that E2 can respond quickly to user comments. E2 does have a good and successful future. You just need to sort out the glitches and make it easier for newcomers to understand the place.
Finally, may I say in public, how much I appreciate Jet-Poop and the other users who helped me on the way to level 2. It has been quite a journey. I don't yet know if it really was worth it, I hope it was. But if nothing else, I do hope that this self-indulgent introspection has helped some users see things from a newcomer's perspective.