I was listening to the latest Weekly Chat and had immediate concerns with the proposed comment tipping from Owners and how that will change the nature of commenting on this platform and possibly kill the current organic nature of comment threads.

    If users are incentivized by the possibility of receiving a BBS tip for starting a large comment thread, every user that realizes this (and is on the platform to profit) will stop replying to comments in an effort to start their own Super comment. I foresee users just tagging the comment they are replying to, but not actually replying to it, so they can start a thread of their own to receive a tip.

    We already have examples we can look to of users manipulating the platform, or misusing platform features, for profit in this manner. The most notable was the Channel system. Users learned that they would receive a portion of all profits from posts that were assigned to their created Channels. What was the result of this? A completely unusable Channel system because users would create redundant channels just so they could profit. The number of channels grew too large to be useful for organization and the system became defunct. 

    Another example is users posting redundant posts. StarWarsTheory.com is a board that has an IP as the board topic. As it would be expected, when there’s news or new content, the site becomes more active. Prior to having moderators users would literally post the same news article or trailer video, 5 or 6 deep, and stacked one on top of the other. This clearly says many users have little care for anything other than what’s in their best interest, not the board’s or the platform’s.

    Personally, I believe BBS tips from Owners/admins will greatly affect comment threads in the same way. Users will see the opportunity to receive bonuses, but only if their comment starts the thread. This will incentivize users to start their own threads instead of replying to other’s comments greatly effecting the organic nature of comment threads across the platform. 

      I will suggest my solution again…. Reward unique commenters with a small percentage of the CPM based ad bonus the publisher receives and they contributed to. If those comments happen to be in a comment thread, reward the commenter that created the thread each time unique comments in the thread contribute to a bonus. This should keep the comment threads organic as all unique commenters will be rewarded if they are in a thread or not. I think if incentivizing users monetarily is a a concern for the platform, this monetary incentive for users to start their own comment thread over replying to another’s comment (that will damage organic comment threads), should be as well.

   And to address those that will say rewarding every unique comment will promote low quality or disingenuous commenting I think it’s worth noting that advertisers only care about making sure they only pay for unique views of their ads. The quality of comments is solely a concern for BBS. 🤔 There will always be users trying to game the system when there’s money up for grabs and mitigation is always going to be the key.

A suggestion for the moderation log….

     While I have your attention I’d like to suggest an additional feature be added to the moderation log. It’s great that reasons for mod actions can now be selected and a record of all actions available for viewing, but I do think it could have been taken one step farther…. It would be very helpful to board Admins if a notification could be auto-generated and sent to the user stating the action and the reason. 🙏

Thanks you for your time. 🙏