Forum - View topicShould ANN re-examine its policy on off-topic discussions?
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 24360 |
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This question was prompted by a post of Key's in the Aria The Scarlett Ammo review discussion thread in the Talkback forum. A digression had occurred where people were clearly more interested in talking about Girls und Panzer than Aria, which is, of course, off-topic. However, the conversation wasn't heated or anything and it got me thinking - does ANN benefit from, say, a 25 post on topic thread more than, say, a 100 post thread that diverged from the original topic? My crude understanding of the financial underpinnings of ANN is that the more clicks and navigation around the site that posters do, the more money ANN makes, right?
So, if the users for whom this site exists to serve, decide that they want to go offtopic and this drives up the number of posts, isn't that actually financially beneficial for ANN? Just to be clear, I'm not talking about offtopic conversations that have turned nasty - those clearly have to be cut off. But if an offtopic conversation thread is reasonably substantive and isn't turning heated, is there really any harm in letting it carry on? In fact, isn't such a result more useful for ANN's bottom line? |
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Saffire
 Posts: 1256 Location: Iowa, USA |
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I would think that the forums aren't active enough to cause a visible shift in how much money ANN is making, and I don't believe forum policy should be decided on that basis in any case. If there's going to be a change here, it should be because the forum environment benefits from it.
This discussion in particular seems like it could have easily been moved to the relevant discussion thread. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24360 |
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It may be fine for you as user to dismiss what helps ANN's bottom line as a metric for determining policy, but any successful business takes a different view, I'm sure. My own opinion is that that users who keep this site financially afloat should be the ones who decide whether an offtopic conversation should be carried on or not. As I say, I'm not talking about letting nasty digressions go on. |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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In my opinion, such subthreads should be cut out and made into standalone ones, with the original only retaining on-topic posts to the greatest degree possible.
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10470 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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Why won't this topic just die a miserable little death in a gutter and get buried in an unmarked grave somewhere off the highway?
Blood-, your understanding of our finances is... not quite wrong, but limited. More clicks / pageviews creates more inventory for us to sell, but like a manufacturer, we only make money when we sell said inventory. In other words, we need to find advertisers to buy those clicks (remnant solutions suck). As it happens, ANN has more inventory than it is able to sell, so more clicks does not equal more money. In fact, I was telling someone yesterday that for the insignificant sum of $x00,000/year, I could double ANN's traffic in less than a year, but there would be no guarantee that I could sell $x00,000 more worth of ads/year. Another interesting topic to digest is that forum impressions are generally seen as less valuable than editorial impressions. Ton's of research has backed up the belief that people are more "banner blind" while they are browsing forums, and they are much less likely to click on ads. The CTR rates in forums is pretty abysmal. That's one of the reasons we actually have fewer ads in our forums than on the rest of the site (although this may change). Some advertisers and ad-networks demand that their ads not appear in the forums. Anyways, none of this really has anything to do with why we don't allow [ot] discussion and thread derailing. We're trying to maintain a certain level of quality discussion in the forum, and it is my opinion, as well as the opinion of other staff, that the rules, as they are, improve the quality of discussion. We're trying to keep a high signal:noise ration in ANN's forums. We love the forums, and we want them to grow as much as possible, but we want to maintain the quality environment as the forums get larger. -t |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24360 |
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@ tempest - I appreciate the reply. I'm the first to admit that my understanding of how online sites actually make money (assuming they are not a retailer) is limited.
Personally, I think that reflexively choking off a discussion simply because it doesn't fit within the original parameters of the thread makes a forum less useful to me as a reader and poster - assuming the digression is itself relatively substantive and non-nasty, but hey, that's just one user's opinion. Perhaps I'm a lonely minority of one in that regard. |
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10470 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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Unfortunately when to stop a diverging discussion is rarely a black and white issue. It's always very grey, so it's up to the moderators to come to their own conclusion about each thread. You may not agree with every decision they make, hell, they may not agree with each other, but overall I hope we can all agree that the general policy is the best for the forum.
-t |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18536 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Since I'm the one involved in adjudicating the incident Blood- is talking about, my general policy is to call for a spin-off discussion to end when it no longer shows any degree of relevance to the original subject matter and starts to dominate the thread to the exclusion of other topics related to the original subject matter. Naturally I have a much lower tolerance for spin-offs that get nasty and/or irritating.
In the referenced thread I felt that the spin-off discussion had become the thread in the process of drifting completely away from the subject matter, which easily fulfilled my two normal standards. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24360 |
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And just to be clear, Key, I wasn't explicitly or implicitly criticizing your call. I knew you were simply enforcing ANN policy, which is why I framed my question the way I did as opposed to making a complaint about your specific judgment.
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ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
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I'm a bit unclear...what exactly is the general policy? I realize it isn't black and white but I think there is a clear distinction to be made here: If the policy is to shut down divergent discussions if they become a problem (ie. They become heated or disrupt people trying to discuss the actual topic) then I agree. That's certainly for the best. If however, the policy is to shut down divergent discussions simply by virtue of their being divergent then no, I don't know that I would say that's for the best. I wouldn't call it some huge detriment either but a lot of times you do see divergent discussions that are either not vigorous enough to be a disruption or are taking place in what was essentially a dead topic anyway. I don't really see any reason to shut those down. (Although, perhaps the mods often don't. I'm not sure). |
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Dessa
 Posts: 4438 |
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Since this is regarding off-topic discussions and tangents that take over threads...
Aniplex Solicitations The thread is supposed to be for posting and discussing solicitations. The last solicitation-related post, at this moment is five and a half pages back. What are these five and a half pages? Arguing back and forth on AoA's price point. For which there is a separate thread for. I'm getting sick and tired of a) this tangential arguing going on, and b) moderators allowing this to continue, and even participating in it! I've been reporting posts left and right, noting in the report that there's a separate thread for discussing the pricing point, and nothing's been done. I check the solicitations thread to see if there's info on Aniplex's solicitations. Not five and a half pages of people bickering back and forth. This isn't the first time this has happened, and the previous times, pages of arguing and soapboxing were removed. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24360 |
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It should be obvious that anything to do with AoA solicitations: i.e. when the sets are coming out, what they look like, what extras are included/not included, PRICE POINTS, etc are all relevant discussion topics. Too bad for you if pricing is one aspect of a solicitation that you personally don't find worth discussing.
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Dessa
Posts: 4438 |
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I don't find it worth discussing? Why then, did I start the other thread? As I stated in my post, it's not off-topic, it's a tangent. And when it turns into 5+ pages of arguing, it's past the point where it should be separated out of the thread.
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24360 |
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That's not for you to decide. AoA's doesn't solicit very many titles. Months can go by without them soliciting any new titles. So, if in the meantime, users want to discuss, for example, price points on past AoA solicitations, that's their business. Not interested, then don't read. No one gives a sh*t what your personal view of how many pages is "enough" for a completely NON-TANGENTIAL discussion (sorry, but your belief that discussions of price points in a solicitation thread is "tangential" is just incredibly stupid).
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relentlessflame
Posts: 188 |
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I think you're being a bit too aggressive. Obviously every Forum has their own concept of what they consider "on-topic", but what Dessa is saying isn't invalid by the rules I know are followed in many places. Being "on topic" isn't necessarily just about "is this related to the topic in question", but also "is this the most appropriate thread for this topic". You're clearly right that discussion of pricing would not necessarily be off-topic for an Aniplex Solicitations thread. But based on there being a thread specifically about Aniplex pricing, that would arguably be even more on-topic over there. Again, the moderators can make their own decision about how they want to handle it, but if they did decide to move that tangent into the other thread (for example), it certainly wouldn't be an illogical choice. One of the reasons you may want to combine similar tangents into one common separate thread is to help reduce the cyclic nature of the conversation to some degree, and so that people aren't repeating the same argument multiple times (as much) in multiple threads to partially-different audiences. It also helps for searchability, and can help actually give the tangent new life and broader exposure. Obviously, as was already alluded to, there has to be some give-and-take in terms of tangents in order to allow conversations to grow and evolve. But there's plenty of room for opinion in terms of where you draw that line and how to best manage the conversation flow. While your point is not wrong, Dessa's argument also holds merit, and I can see why one might prefer to have one thread more focused on news/updates, and the other more for the pricing debate. It's a preference. Having that conversation in the Solicitations thread wasn't necessarily so bad, but it arguably wasn't the best place to have it either. Perhaps file it under "Opportunity for Improvement". (And for my part, I'm sorry for contributing to the tangent; I was linked in to the conversation in progress and didn't look for the other thread.) |
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