The cool thing about a specialized vertical social site like Sphinn is you tend to get a better concentration of smart people contributing stories to the community. But that’s not always the case. Rose Desrochers posted a link to a story claiming BlogCatalog doesn’t pass PageRank because their links contain OnClick. Her evidence was a SEW post from last year where Matt and Brian made some comments about the Washington Post selling blogroll links.
Andy Beard responded with a great post that explained what was really said (and more importantly, what was not said) by Matt and Brian. He also included a ton of quality researched information that would lead most sensible people to the conclusion that the idea that the mere existence of OnClick automatically prevents PageRank from being passed is probably a bit far-fetched. But Rose isn’t one of those people. Instead of responding to the specifics in Andy’s post, she instead resorted to name calling.
Now normally, I’m not a big fan of Digg’s "bury it" function, but in this case, I think it’s warranted. If we can’t get Danny to give us the ability to make a stupid post go away, then at least give us a big red Dumbass button that will flag the post as one not worth clicking on.
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Agreed. This onclick thing is one of the strangest discussions/arguments I’ve seen for a while.
That killed me, Greg! Great way to start my day. I guess without that button, public shaming will have to do for now.
Isn’t it worse for her that her foolishness stays up there for everybody to see and laugh at?
I think we’re going to actually call it “Lame.” Probably later this month, I’m opening up a thread on adding these types of buttons. There’s been all that concern about a “bury brigade” at Digg, so I didn’t want to go live with that button until the community developed first and had a chance to talk about it. I really lean toward several buttons: Spam | Disagree | Dupe | Old News.
I took care of the name calling, by the way
What I would like to see is rather than a “bury” type button that takes away sphinns, A “lame” or whatever button that has it’s own count. And the ability to see who sphunn and who lamed a particular article.
Especially with all the disagreement on certain topics, and the speculation that naturally comes with SEO topics. There may be times that one group disagrees with another on something, and this would make the process a lot more transparent than simply burying stories.
I’d like to see some version of a Dumbass button, simply because it’s nice to have a way to disagree with things as well as having a way to promote them. I see that you can vote people’s comments up or down, but not the posts themselves. It sure would be a shame to incite a bury-brigade at Sphinn, but I’ve not seen that happen with comments yet (it doesn’t normally happen with posts or comments at SEOmoz either, regarding our Thumbs system…) I’d HOPE (hope!!) that SEOs are generally above that sort of Diggtard behaviour. Bring on the Lame button!
I would be ecstatic if such a button existed, but only if Danny kept the name “dumbass.”
Are you calling me a dumbass?
Yes
A Rose by any other name would still be a dumbass.
Greg,
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I usually just keep looking when any discussion starts with or relies heavily on PageRank. The whole idea of PR is a “mine is bigger than yours” debate. Who cares?
You put it bluntly, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been said!
I, personally, give a ‘Thumbs Up’ probably 8-9 times for every “Thumbs Down” I give via Stumble!. Most of the pages it has referred me to are pretty well constructed with relevant and reasonably correct information. (I also look at ‘conspiracy theory’ sites and give them a thumbs up for simply adding plausible / novel information). I’ve only been active there for a few days, but I’ve probably ranked 100 or more pages in that time.
Since I am new to ’social networking’, what is the value proposition that differentiates Sphinn from Stumble? I am thinking that Google uses pretty sterile metrics for valuing a URL, but that the social network ranking systems, using ‘wetware’ will actually do a better job of narrowing a selection down to a meaningful flood of sites. It is my hope that my preferences (via the scoring system) will shape the selection of sites I am offered.
I think that matching an up or down score with the IP sending it (and only allowing one of either per IP) should make a -1 plenty valid. Judging from long years in the Usenet trenches, I’d guess that the community is usually pretty good at exposing and shaming those who ‘cry wolf’ too often or two loudly.
Better still would be a system where the same IP could change its mind (perhaps in response to clarification / correction of a matter) but only the most recent vote would be counted. Still, allowing only one vote per IP per direction, if an IP has previously given a -1, then each subsequent vote from the same IP would only change the sign from a - to a + to a -, etc.
Complicated perhaps, but it would allow a “One IP / One Vote” system where the vote could change (up OR down) to reflect changes in the contents of the site or the contents of the reviewers brain (hopefully both are amenable to editing as needed).
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