Over-posting

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HankSimon
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Re: Over-posting

Post by HankSimon »

Unfortunately, I agree with the RealChris. Sometimes this Forum sounds like a set of teenage tweets, rather than an exploration and celebration of the art of Origami. Although I applaud the folks who have grown significantly in their ability to create new designs, for continued growth, this community will have to self-monitor with both discipline and diplomacy.

The question is not the quality of the Origami, but the quality of sharing and conversation. I haven't run the statistics, but I feel that the number of posts - "Here is a new technique I found, let me show you how" is much much smaller percentage-wise than "Hey, look at my new CP" or "Can someone show me where to find and fold this CP?" It's a subtle shift from art appreciation to a vanity board.

For the next month, read the posts and see if you learn more about origami or about the social lives of the posters. There's nothing wrong with a social network, plenty exist. This is your Forum, decide which focus is more important, because a concentration on both, dilutes both.
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Re: Over-posting

Post by phillipcurl »

HankSimon wrote:Unfortunately, I agree with the RealChris. Sometimes this Forum sounds like a set of teenage tweets, rather than an exploration and celebration of the art of Origami. Although I applaud the folks who have grown significantly in their ability to create new designs, for continued growth, this community will have to self-monitor with both discipline and diplomacy.

The question is not the quality of the Origami, but the quality of sharing and conversation. I haven't run the statistics, but I feel that the number of posts - "Here is a new technique I found, let me show you how" is much much smaller percentage-wise than "Hey, look at my new CP" or "Can someone show me where to find and fold this CP?" It's a subtle shift from art appreciation to a vanity board.

For the next month, read the posts and see if you learn more about origami or about the social lives of the posters. There's nothing wrong with a social network, plenty exist. This is your Forum, decide which focus is more important, because a concentration on both, dilutes both.
I agree with this...

a lot of the newer users (i don't include me as "new user" because i have been reading on this forum since 2008 and most of the time don't make useless posts) make useless posts, like bragging about their new status upgrade or some sh!t like that. nothing useful.

and yes, I will admit that i sometimes neglect to use the search button and make a post that has already been made, but usually, i do not.

i just think that a lot of younger, unintelligent children are starting to use the internet (no offense to any of the younger users here, i'm not just stamping a tag on all younger children) and are thinking "hey ima go troll this forum hahahahaha penis hahaha lulz ima hax0r"... then they sign up and don't do anything useful whatsoever.

when I signed up on this forum 5 months ago, i'll admit i didn't really do anything useful for my first 15 or so posts. i just wanted to get my status above "newbie". but then, i realized that it was actually fun to participate and help people, not just try and upgrade my status
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Re: Over-posting

Post by Baltorigamist »

I think that maybe the reason there aren't many "new techniques" being discovered is that many of the structures that exist have already been found, so stumbling upon something completely new would happen almost entirely by chance. It's like discovering a new element, for example. So many have already been discovered that almost all of what you're likely to find is already widely known.

Origami can still advance--it's just up to the wits of the designer to find a way to combine existing techniques and crease patterns to open up a new field of folding.
Take textures, for example. I think nobody's done much of them because they take up too much paper, but I feel that, if used correctly, they could be of enormous benefit to origami. Think of the Ryujin, Zoanoid Dragon,etc. The scales set them apart from other models. Imagine if someone could devise an efficient way to only cover parts of a model and not others (going beyond the Scaled Koi). That's the kind of thing waiting to be discovered, and I think the forums are only biding their time until it is.

And once that method is found, the forum might explode into useful activity where people scramble to understand it, master the technique, and advance the art even further.
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Re: Over-posting

Post by GWB origami »

i apologize if i was one of the over posters. you guys have a good point. i will try to help people more and be more useful now.
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Re: Over-posting

Post by bnm70 »

...Sorry about my useless posts .@philipcurl

I'll help people more. But if you try to help every person and dont say useless posts it isnt over posting. Right?
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Re: Over-posting

Post by phillipcurl »

aight, i guess that works.
but still, there is really no need for posting on everything. you can't answer everyone's questions.
but no, i guess its not overposting...if your helping people. you could also try to participate in discussions, like now, not just answering question or something.
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Re: Over-posting

Post by malifold »

phillipcurl wrote:useless posts don't. the bandwidth does. if they go over bandwidth for the month, lets say its 300 gb, (not sure), and if Boss's posts are each 2 words then that averages about 8-15 bytes per post. then you add in the signature and title, information on the right, etc, we are around maybe 100 bytes per post. 1 letter = 1 byte approximately.
Aren't the signature and title and info on the right stored somewhere else?
I mean, doesn't changing your signature or avatar modify that info on all of your previous posts?
So that would probably average only about 20 bytes per post, making even less of a dent.
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Re: Over-posting

Post by OrigamiMagiro »

The argument to not post short and unnecessary responses is purely economic; not for saj perhaps or even for bandwidth, but for world productivity. Let's do a little estimation.

Each inane comment posted to a thread like "cool" or "agreed" takes some finite time for the average user to read or scroll through to get to actual content. Making a conservative estimate, this wastes about 0.5 seconds of each viewer's time.

This might not sound like a lot, but consider that the average post on the forum might have around 300 views per year, leading to about 2.5 minutes of wasted time. If there are 10 such inane posts per day, over the course of the year that's ~3650 inane postings costing 2.5 minutes of global productive time each, or about 150 hours cumulative. Minimum wage being around $7.50/hr means an approximate $1125 drain on the world economy.

These are all /very/ conservative estimates, just for /our/ small forum. Think of how much economy could be saved and used for better purposes if all the forum posters of the world behaved responsibly.

Be respectful of people's time; don't waste it.
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Re: Over-posting

Post by MichaelBrock »

I'm a newbie folder (at least new at taking it seriously) and have only a few posts here. I am a bit confused by this whole thread. If the point is to improve the usefulness of the forums it is going to take more than reducing the number of poor quality posts. More active posts inviting participation, like the monthly contests is a good step. But simply reducing the number of inane posts is simply going to drop the traffic down to levels even lower than they currently are. New visitors are going to see that the forums have only a few posts a day and assume that the whole thing is dead in the water. Why bother posting a question when traffic appears to be so low that the chance of a useful reply is unlikely? The useless posts at least give the forums some life that comes with traffic.
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Re: Over-posting

Post by Baltorigamist »

The point is that there are generally several useful posts every day. This topic seems to have worked somewhat, as I'm seeing fewer and fewer needless posts.

Saj is paying for the bandwidth that this site uses on the Internet. Would you rather have it that hundreds of useless posts a month take it to the point where Saj can't afford to keep it running any longer? It's better to have a slower forum than to have the webmaster take the site down for financial reasons. Besides, as long as there are even only a few posts a day, chances are that someone will reply eventually.
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