Killing postcount?

[Keith]

Note: I don't know where you go to discuss the forum itself. Hopefully this is the right place ; if not, can a mod move it please?

I can't speak for anyone else, but having a postcount stat makes me feel a bit nervous about 'keeping up with the Joneses'. Quantity isn't quality, and I have to wonder if there is really any purpose to this stat other than to encourage the former at the expense of the latter?

Steve once noted that, although conventional wisdom is to break blog entries up into small chunks to increase page hits, he prefers to write longer articles because they are more meaningful to readers.

Does the pagecount stat work against this principle; encouraging writers to write numerous short posts rather than longer, more considered (and presumably more useful) ones? Should postcount be turned off to discourage this?

Thoughts?

[Bruce Achterberg]

Originally Posted by Keith

Note: I don't know where you go to discuss the forum itself. Hopefully this is the right place ; if not, can a mod move it please?

The General & Introductions board/forum is fine for discussing things related to the forum. As the title implies, threads that are more "general" and don't really fit into the other boards fit in well here.

As for moving a thread, the moderators can certainly do that for you if necessary, but in this case it is not. So long as you aren't making off-topic thread in boards intentionally, don't be too worried about something being potentially off topic since at least one of the moderators is likely to spot such a thing and move it to a better location if necessary. If you're really concerned you can always contact one of the moderators via forum PM and ask for their assistance before or after you post a new thread, or whenever you need assistance in general. We're here, and more then willing to help.

Originally Posted by Keith

I can't speak for anyone else, but having a postcount stat makes me feel a bit nervous about 'keeping up with the Joneses'. Quantity isn't quality, and I have to wonder if there is really any purpose to this stat other than to encourage the former at the expense of the latter?

Steve once noted that, although conventional wisdom is to break blog entries up into small chunks to increase page hits, he prefers to write longer articles because they are more meaningful to readers.

Does the pagecount stat work against this principle; encouraging writers to write numerous short posts rather than longer, more considered (and presumably more useful) ones? Should postcount be turned off to discourage this?

Thoughts?

I wholeheartedly agree with, support, and try to incorporate the true meaning of the saying "quality over quantity" into my everyday actions. With that said, while some users may see a high post count as some sort of measure of success and gain satisfaction from it, in my opinion, the reason the post count exists is more for evaluative purposes.

For example, when looking at a particular forum member you can gain a lot of information by looking at the amount of posts they've made by taking into consideration the quality of the posts in their post history (i.e. whether they contribute something of value with each of their posts or if they are mostly unnecessary fluff) as well as their current forum reputation (the actual reputation system used on the forum, not just their social "status" within the community, something which would be near impossible to measure).

You can also use the post count to see how active a particular user has been within the forum in general and you can also tie that in with the factors I mentioned before. The post count is particularly useful for moderators and forum admin since such data can provide valuable information that can assist them with their moderation duties, although any forum user can use the post count to evaluate which posts you may want to pay attention to and take the time to read thoroughly and which you should probably just scan over or ignore entirely. It isn't a fool proof system, but it is useful at times.

Overall, while you shouldn’t come to rely solely on the post count when making decisions and evaluating others, it is definitely useful for that purpose and I think the positives of such a feature far outweigh the negatives. Even if we did remove the post count and took that option to it’s logical conclusion I bet we’d still see those who want to make “unnecessary fluff” posts making them since I believe such people take such actions mostly for the attention they receive, not because of the satisfaction they gain from reaching a certain amount of posts.

My advice to you would be to lead by example -- prove to your fellow forum community members that "less is more" and that it is quite possible to include a high amount of quality in what you do without resorting to making excessive amounts of posts.

[SydneyDave]

I worked on a gamer site once where I refused to implement a post count feature for exactly that reason. But as Bruce said, the fluff posters will always post fluff, the funny people will always post funnies, and so on.

Don't worry about keeping up with the Joneses, if it really bothers you, consider "spending" posts as Steve speaks of "spending" time, or some programmers consider "spending" lines of code (rather than using it as a measure of productivity).

Of course if you are one of those many people on these forums who make excellent posts please disregard that comment altogether!!

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Bruce Achterberg

The General & Introductions board/forum is fine for discussing things related to the forum. As the title implies, threads that are more "general" and don't really fit into the other boards fit in well here.

Just a quick note, Bruce, I had moved it out of the Steve Pavlina forum, since that is set aside for talking about blog posts and articles, rather than general questions about the forums themselves.