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About moderation in the Investor's section of TMC

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ggr

Expert in Dunning-Kruger Effect!
Moderator
Mar 24, 2011
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San Diego, CA
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Moderator notes/reminders:
1. There are a few topics that are banned in this "catchall" thread.
(a) talking about putting people on the ignore list. Go ahead and take the action, but don't talk about it. We consider it a personal attack.
(b) making other personal attacks on members
(c) ... particularly attacks on Electrek, or Fred Lambert personally. He is a member here too, but the real reason is it gets people worked up.
(d) perpetual motion machines, solar cells on cars, politics, numerous others. You'll find out if you hit one.

2. There's a separate thread for FUDdish articles. Please use it, although sometimes it is topical/relevant enough to post here. But if you're going to post a link to such an article on Bloomberg (because of their stupid title mangling) you SHALL* also post at least the title. For other FUDdy sources (including but not limited to Electrek, Sleazing Alpha, Business Insider, Wall St. Journal) remember that there are many readers who won't want to follow the link, so you SHOULD post a sentence or two about what the article is about, what's wrong with it, or whatever, so that people don't have to follow the link.

3. Please respect the difference between personal speech (which we try to honor even if we disagree) and racist/sexist/blahblah speech. Case in point: "I wish we could get rid of the old white guys in power" is an opinion, even if you don't like it. "Old white guys are idiots" would be ageist and sexist.

4. Sometimes people make unsubstantiated claims. Sometimes the facts are common knowledge or should have been available in previous postings; great. But don't make statements out of the blue without providing justification, it makes us think that you might be a troll. Also don't make postings just saying "Link?" or "Reference?" -- they're worthless, and trolls also use such responses to engage others in endless conversations. Sometimes you might simply make a mistake. Fine, correct it if you can, or message the moderators if it's too late for you to fix, own up. But an intentional false statement (as judged by moderators, whose decisions are final) is pretty much a guarantee of a temporary ban.

5. We have recently seen that media and analysts do pick up stuff written here. Often they quote it out of context, and this can be especially dangerous if the content was supposed to be a joke or sarcasm, but maybe it wasn't obvious enough. Please make it obvious with "/S" or smileys or whatever. This also helps people for whom English is a second language, or ones with no sense of humor :).

Please try to keep in mind that your moderators are all volunteers, we are all bound by the TMC terms and conditions and some that are specific to moderation. We try to keep up but sometimes it's just impossible. When the volume is high, deleting stuff is pretty much all we can cope with.

* RFC 2119 - Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Lev (RFC2119) defines some of the terms mentioned above.

--ggr.

PS: if you want to discuss any of this, I will be creating a separate thread and will update this post with a link. DO NOT reply in the main thread.
 
particularly attacks on Electrek, or Fred Lambert personally. He is a member here too, but the real reason is it gets people worked up
I'm sorry but this is not a good position to take. Fred is part of the media, and just like all other members of the media he is open to direct criticism. We don't have special rules about anyone else in the media. For example Linette Lopez also gets people worked up, and rightly so. FUD from Fred/Electrek cannot get a pass.
 
Wouldn't it be easier to just ask everyone to post on-topic in the appropriate threads/forums and moderate from there?

You'd lose the gold star of having this massive annualTesla thread, but the discourse would be much more robust.

I'd love to see the posting stats for now vs a few years back. Seems to me there are now 20 posters flooding the "main thread" and the vast majority of regular posters post far less overall than they used to.
 
Yeah, ultimately, I feel like the idea of main thread, when there's a whole subforum for this, has become unsustainable - its posting volume is actually what keeps its posting volume so high, because everyone in it spends significant time trying to keep up with it, rather than the other threads.
 
We tried two threads in the past, volume ended up mostly in only one of them anyway, but you had to follow both in case something significant was posted to the other. That also caused redundant posting so actually increased volume. There are no good solutions.
 
This setup works for people who want to follow the main thread all day every day. That's not a large percentage of posters.

You could keep nearly all discussion in one forum, just split it out better. There could just as easily be one Model Y thread rather than a Model Y forum. Maybe only gave 3 or 4 forums:

Tesla (main forum for anything nontechnical)
Vehicles (all technical discussion)
Energy (Powerwall, oil, renewables, etc)
OT (fart jokes, politics)
 
The investor thread has only one problem: lack of discipline. Too many people are using it as a chatbox, writing nonsense. The thread is a rich source of news and analysis, but the high quality posts get crowded out by a lot of junk that should never have been published. If only people would consider before posting: am I going to add something of substance with this comment? And does it concern Tesla, EV's or investing? I think that in 50% of the cases the answer would be no. Without those posts it would be a delight to read the thread.
 
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You have a lot of intelligent people with interests and knowledge in various subjects, many of which relate to Tesla and TSLA. It's near impossible to enforce the discipline you envision without stifling discussion and making way too much work for moderators. It's only going to get worse as more people join the site, I don't know what the solution is.
 
You could add more feedback options so the community can help identify useless posts.

The only negative option is "disagree", but it says nothing about the reason why the user disagrees. Is it:
  • uninteresting?
  • unsubstantiated?
  • off topic?
  • bigoted?
  • petty?
In my experience, "disagrees" ratings are too often misinterpreted. I'm sure some people care about how they are perceived so providing more details as to why a particular post is not liked could help a little -- contributors, lurkers, and moderators.
 
The investor thread has only one problem: lack of discipline. Too many people are using it as a chatbox, writing nonsense. The thread is a rich source of news and analysis, but the high quality posts get crowded out by a lot of junk that should never have been published. If only people would consider before posting: am I going to add something of substance with this comment? And does it concern Tesla, EV's or investing? I think that in 50% of the cases the answer would be no. Without those posts it would be a delight to read the thread.

Do you think per-thread rate-limiting might help? I'd like to try limiting each user to one post per hour in the designated investor thread. Do you think that limit would slow down the chat aspect, and encourage us to create topic-specific threads?

Xenforo has some rate-limiting features built in. However I'm not certain that they're flexible enough to support what I'm suggesting. There might be an add-on to help — maybe this one: Post Flood Permissions