How to increase quality posts.

From spending a lot of time as a guest here, and recently joining I've noticed one thing more often that any other:

People DON'T READ.

All they do is TYPE.

If a news article, or most other thread is over a certain limit, it appears that most people don't even bother to read it. People asks questions that they wouldn't need to had they read the report or the thread.

This is not QUALITY BEHAVIOR.

If part of my thread contains, "I am x years old, and have been living in yy for 10 of those years. I have a lot of experience with zzz."

... and questions pop up saying, "How old are you?" Or "You don't even live in yy, so how would you know?"

Or any other of the thousands of threads where people have already told the vary things they are being asked... time and time again.

I remember reading a thread a few months ago, it was a long thread about aliens or something and people kept asking the OP... THE SAME QUESTIONS... over and over and over again. The OP kept responding "I won't answer repeat questions" over and over again.

It's like, what is wrong? with these people?

Who in their right mind wants to read through that mess?

My experience on ATS, so far:

MY FIRST THREAD HERE had a post that I consider NON-QUALITY: In part of my post, I mentioned that I was active duty for 6 years. This should imply that I know a good deal of things about the military.

Someone in the thread posted this, as if they had never even read what I posted;

To the OP, Um sorry to tell you but it is written in the Uniformed Code of Military Justice. Hate to break it to you but a military person is basically nothing more than government property. Sounds harsh, but very true.

Did you know that you can confine military personnel indefinately, limit them to bread and water rations for punishment and can also take away personally owned items, to include weapons.

I'm not making a mountain out of these either. That is all included in the "myth of the UCMJ" which every military person eventually hears about.

... but to the poster: No, I didn't know that. I also didn't know we had to go through boot camp, or learn to fire a weapon.

It is RIDICULOUS.

Or how about threads were people are OBVIOUSLY taking BOGUS information and PUSHING IT ALONG AS THE TRUTH.

In one of my other threads, I wrote this:

It's only putting a 0.5% tax on all energy consumption above twice the normal rate of any household, based on statistics from the last 15 years.

If that's not what it's going to do, THEN WHAT IS IT GOING TO DO?!

You'd think someone would ask for a REFERENCE or something on that, especially considering the DRAFT of the bill wasn't even available.. but still, I get this:

The small .05%, "Starting" tax rate is effectively a price entry point, it is low so that the public & commercial business owners don't flip their lid when it is implemented; however, this small tax will most certainly be increased, and a lot faster than anyone would imagine. It's all smiles, handshakes, and promises of, "strong limitation" when they want shove it to citizens, but, mark my words, when this bill is passed, it is going to hurt.

There is some SERIOUS, momentum behind making this tax a reality, and I think that, "Cap And Trade" is just the beginning.

The above just shows me a member who will take ANY amount of tax and BLOW IT OUT OF PROPORTION for the sake of doing it.

I realize that ATS has created some fancy "quality system" after reading a few threads about it. It's clear that ATS is trying to get the users to control themselves.

I think we all know that Moderators are not impartial for the most part. Case in point, once a mod begins participating in a thread they can no longer act in a moderator status in said thread. We've all seen Moderators get involved to the point of looking silly because they are putting their personal obligations before their moderator obligations.

What I recommend is create a new group of members, those who are impartial to the topics at hand.

Their task is to see past the topic, and their main goal is to enforce REFERENTIAL INTEGRITY between the topic of the thread, and the posts pertaining to the topic.

This is much more than some simple off-topic posting. A post can still be on topic but still be contextually and connotatively invalid. Redundancy must be stuck down as well.

The Anarchy must not be allowed to continue, and the shiny presents of content contributors and what have you will only last long enough for the cycle to repeat itself.

Strike the core of the problem! The QUALITY of ATS MUST become better!

The users MUST submit to quality, either by conquest or consent!

Madness?

THIS....

IS...

ATS QUALITY!!!


[edit on 20-5-2009 by Illuminatus I]

reply to post by Illuminatus I


I completely understand your frustrations with the way threads work. My own posting rate has shrunk to nothing, partly because of this very problem, and partly because I'm still in a sulk about the new tags...

Anyway. I do share your feelings about how irritating it can be when a thread fills up with posts from people who you *know* haven't taken the time to read and comprehend what you've taken so much time to write as precisely as you can. I can't bear the ensuing arguments, so I read much much more than I post now, unless it's something totally lightweight like the 3 Word Story, or meaningful to another member, like Dave Rabbit's Vietnam thread. ATS is now more about information and a tiny bit about social contact for me.

Sadly this linguistic anarchy you talk about is part of who we are as humans, and I guess that if you analysed our conversations over a day or a week, you would find a huge amount of redundant language. It's what we do. In defence of the Mods, I would like to suggest that being a Mod here is some kind of hell, and the strictness of the moderating on ATS does'nt make it any easier, I'm sure. I don't really know where you would start to police redundancy in discussion. You would expect Mods to edit posts down to the mimimum? How do you see it working? Impartiality is a rare thing here...no-one posts here to be neutral, in my opinion.

[edit on 20-5-2009 by caitlinfae]

The ATS staff and owners appreciate all feedback be it criticism or praise. Obviously in this case it's criticism so I would like to direct you to the The ATS Issues Thread where all these concerns should be expressed. I will be closing this thread and look forward to you making your viewpoint known in the proper thread listed above.

Thank you so much for your understanding.

Regards,
The ATS Staff


Closing