RFC: User-created challenges / Changingthe public posts page

I like the plan for the open challenges, that sounds like fun. I fully support the thumbnail issue, or perhaps just an auto resize like the profile pictures on Consumating, with a full size lurking just a click away. Have you considered a search function yet? Not sure if it would work better for people or for themes in the replies, but perhaps that's farther down the line.

ready to, too.

I sent you an email, which was just a smaller part of a larger concept email I had started to write you yesterday. I'm all for the challenges, and I'd like to raise some points that people might want to weigh in on.

1. One reply per person, like the QotW? I think this makes sense because otherwise it gets treated like a conversation.

2. ranking: Nobody likes the popularity thing, but I think that there are some instances where a ranking is meaningful, particularly something more than just a thumb-up or thumb-down. It would have been fun with consumating to see the highest ranked answers to QotWs, since you'd hope they'd be more enjoyable than the rest. But I wouldn't want it to come down to who had the most friends so maybe that's not viable.

3. Different Types of Challeneges: I like the idea of different types of contests, like "Write a themesong for this site" or "Draw a picture of Ben brown" and allowing for a means to post them and view them or listen to them all at once.

I would hope that these challenges would encourage people to do some pretty cool stuff on the internet, making it a more engaging experience. Maybe that's naive, though.

Also, I know you're not big on profile pages being all about what bands people like. I think it'd be cool to allow people to put their favorite challenge responses or posts on their profile page in a sortof traphy-case type thing. that way people are more defiend by what they've done than by what they like.

I'd also like to discourage this site from becoming a Meme dumping ground (unless the challenge is "design a new Meme"), but I may be wrestling a different animal here.

@joel: i really like the "trophy case" idea. Only, unlike consumating, where you could re-arrange your QoTW answers to a similar end, it'd be good if the trophy case could sit alongside your most recent stuff rather than the two having to vie for the same spots.

also i agree with acidlace way back when he said it would be nice for new stuff to be categorized, because it does seem a shame for essays to get buried beneath a link/photo dump.

re: categorizing content

You could have "tabs" for the different content types, similar to the different post types. This would make sense as far as usability goes.

I like the idea of being able to click on a "Photos area" where when people decide to have a Photo-based conversation, that's where they go. Or you could be able to set your Public page to either show pictures or not. Also, the challenges would be fine if we could just post photo replies. I've been wanting to do a "Let's talk to each other in pictures." I don't really need any kind of ranking system, although it would be neat if the posts you thumbed down just disappeared from your public page, ala Digg. And it would be pretty sweet to be able to close out of things in the Replies page.

More catagories would be pretty sweet... that way we could decide, ok do we REALLY want to see a bunch of posts talking about how said people are that they're single? No? Ok, so not clicking on the Relationships catagory, that's for damned sure.

We walk backwards into the future, as Kierkegaard put it. That said, I tend to see this site so far as a kind of 4Chan with filters. And a classier userbase. And meaningful replies, such as can be found on boards other than /b. It also, somehow, reminds me of BBSes, in the old, pre-internet sense.

Concretely on topic, I think I separate 'Contests' tab is a great idea. A set of thumbnails, either random or recent, on the sidebar, showcases recent image contest entries.

But I also think contests should be fed into the main public stream. How to do that?

People here don't like ratings on individual posts; as has been pointed out, that's easily hijacked. But a certain number of replies indicates, in a value-neutral way, the worthiness of a contest for the main page. It could be good, it could be bad, but it's at least participation-worthy.

Everyone but me, it seems, has come here from Consumating, and has a fondness for the one-week contest. That works well when everyone's on the same page and has only one topic to contribute to.

So here's my idea: to weed out lame ideas, set a threshold of replies after which a contest bubbles up to the public feed. The very appearance of the contest on the main page will prompt a critical mass of participation. Expire the contest one week after this has happened.

Bubbling up contest topics to the main page would also allow non-image topics to get some exposure.

You can easily increase the required-participation-threshold as the site gets more traffic.

Contest entries should be limited to one per user. Contest creators get to choose the medium of reply, ie, photo, essay, link, whatever, or choose not to choose if that is their choice, in which case the entrants choose.

Individual entries should show up as discrete, standalone pieces of content on their respective users' pages. It would also funnel discussion to the individual entry pages; "I am so impressed with your hand crocheted depiction of the emerging internet folksonomy" is off topic for the contest, but on topic for the contest *entry*.

Programmatically, I think I'd do this by linking contest entries with a (maybe auto-generated, hidden) unique tag. But this is just my mind trying to work with your site's current structure. Yr writing the php, you do it however you think bestest.

Hand crocheted depiction of... I think I just came up with my first contest!

regarding ranking content:

joel's trophy cabinet + teams actually solves the problem.

It goes like this...
On consumating there was only one ranking of content and of members. If you disagreed with the majority, too bad.
But here we choose our teams so we already have personalized ranking of individuals -- and it's really personalized: there's no evil uber-ranking, no particular incentive to trick/coerce/sweet-talk people into feeding your "popularity". Just choose whose stuff you want to get fed.
Second, if individual members have a trophy cabinet then they effectively rank their own content, again without any uber-ranking that's insensitive to differences in personal tastes. And if I lie what a member is posting, I'll probably like their judgment about what stuff of theirs is the best.
Last of all, the little thumbs up/down buttons still play a role: they give feedback on individual posts, helping you to feel good about your postings, and giving you an idea of what your audience likes -- which was an important role that the thumbs system originally played in consumating before it was highjacked by people who were simply very good at asking for thumbs, rather than producing content.

On contest expirations:

I like deadlines for encouraging me to do things, but I think a standardized limit is tough. Possibly user defined (ie. 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, FOREVER)?

Not sure on that, though.

/clear

oh, i'm glad it's teensy for someone else. i thought it was just me. i wonder if that has something to do with the iphone version.

I would really love to be able to watch a conversation even if it is someone not on my team.