Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-1990160-20130325231534/@comment-3308937-20130326101947

It's nice to see you doing things like this Teh, not used to this aggressive side of you. I'm not sure on this issue at the moment; this style does promote interaction and is, at times, easier to follow in regards to everything being linear instead of having huge discussion chains in comment sections (could possibly be fixed by separating different discussions within said sections). There are other times though, as you mentioned that this linearity is detrimental and those times, when regarding a wiki discussion, do seem to come up a little more than the good times.

I have to agree with the kudos thing, it just can't be taken seriously as a tool for voting on anything that requires actual thought. The location of the kudos button, the ease to press it, the ability for some users to be caught in a snowball effect ("well this option has 50 kudos and the other only has 20, I'll go with the 50 one") and, the biggest one to me, the fact that it gives a false sense of support and backing by having an inflated number that, in regards to a discussion, means practically nothing.

With that said I'd like to bring up another issue: Who gets to decide the outcome of a discussion. In a tight discussion with multiple sides having strong arguments, like, say, in our previous highlight discussions, who gets to "win?" We have issues with discussions ending up with nothing happening because there's no real force to decide what's going to happen. I guess this could be solved by which side has the most opinionated votes but that just falls back into a majority/minority vote which I'm not sure is the best course of action.

We could, for instance, vote a couple of trustworthy users into a sort of judge-like group for the sake of deciding on issues. They would act like the US Supreme Court in that the decision for the issue would be decided by majority vote among the "judges" after opinions have been heard in a discussion thread. This is what I was doing in regards to user rights with the judge-like group being some admins, Aj and myself.