Tired of Current's Initial Story Placement?

I would guess the pods are getting the same amount of up and down votes, but they're just hidden. I think the trolls are just "under the bridge" now, vs "running around."

I do miss seeing all the Greenlights accumulating that everyone gave for the pods, but I'm not sure I would want to see them on the Current News submissions.

what makes you think they are under the bridge and not still running around redlighting things in a frenzy? It's just now, we can't tell.

I think they are "still running around redlighting things in a frenzy." By "under the bridge" I meant they were now just able to do it anonymously. I would guess that this is now a bigger problem than ever.

ahh, I see! I thought you meant they were lying low under a bridge but I see what you mean in that now they are hidden. It was really bad just before they switched the system off.

Hey guys,

I wanted to address a couple of things about voting, percentages and trolls that have come up in this thread.

//voting percentages//

One of the reasons the percentages were removed was because it could be misleading; the number of greenlights and redlights is one of the factors we use when determining popularity, but it isn’t the only one. The way the percentages were displayed didn’t give context, which caused some confusion as to why certain stories were more popular than others. For example, a story where only 2 people voted would have a percentage of 50% yes and 50% no, vs. a story that had a percentage of 25% yes and 50%, but had been voted on by 100 people.

//Sock Puppet Voting//

We do have systems in place to help with the detection of inappropriate voting activity (for example, sockpuppeting behavior) and we do address those issues and correct them behind the scenes. If someone continually votes red on one individual's content, it is taken into account, as are several other voting patterns.

//It's OK to Post Red Votes//

Simply voting negatively on a story without commenting does NOT constitute troll-like behavior. Trolling is done to gain attention and cause conflicts to arise, so it’s pretty unlikely that someone who is trolling would vote without commenting, when they could stir up a lot more trouble by leaving an inflammatory comment.

Forcing comments on votes, or listing who voted negatively on stories has the potential to result in a lot more drama and retaliatory voting/commenting, which is why we do not have any plans to force comments or list negative votes.

Ideally, people should be voting on the merits of the item itself, not casting a vote because they are responding to way that the original poster voted on their item. Is that going to happen 100% of the time? Of course not. But we want to encourage that type of voting and discussion as much as possible, and the majority of people who do vote on the merits of a story will tend to balance out the few who don’t.

Best,
Steph
Online Community Team

Giving people redlights on their pods is different than news items as they put much more work into the former. I don't think it fair to producers that people have a right to redlight their work without commentary while the producer doesn't have the right to know why or be able to challenge such a vote. It's very discouraging for producers

You mention the percentage scale being askewed but what I saw at the end of Nov was more than just askewed, it was way off with pods 70-80% in the red despite all the comments being positive. I had not seen some a lopsided percentage before that time.

just because they attract huge audiences like a Springer episode does not mean that only these topics need to dominate.

true dat

I don't make the rules, I just play the game.

Well all be damned! In the last year, I've never seen that one time. And it looks as if everyone who has posted has never seen it as well. So maybe it's time for a little bit bigger link? Or a quite a bit bigger link! What a revelation.

To be honest, I would like to see a split page. The top 20 most popular side and a top 20 newest upload page. Back in the day, that's how it used to be.

And I would still like a ranking number on the story page itself.

yeah i didnt see it right away either, it is a bit hard to spot

I dont have that on my page??????

the video auto play bugs me as well.

yea, sometimes i feel that some of the things that ppl vote up have seen a lot of airtime on other networks already. But whenever you bring something new to the table, you risk people either making you feel like a dumbass for it or pumped cuz it actually made it number 1 (which is super rare)

good point about bombardment! I had a friend sign up to vote on one of my pods and about an hour later they contacted me complaining they had 7 emails from Current with the "so-n-so thinks you'll like this." They marked it as spam so they wouldn't get anymore.

One wouldn't have to mark it as SPAM, they could simply deal with it from within the e-mail (if they wanted to).

"To block this community member from sharing items with you, click here."

I guess marking it as SPAM would stop all of the e-mail, whereas using the link from within the e-mail would only stop each individual user.

I recommend a separate G-mail account just for Current.com, that way when you check that e-mail you can expect a ton of the "so and so thinks you'll like this" and it won't clutter up any of your "real" e-mail addresses.

yeah but setting up a seperate email or going thru the process of setting it in your profile is too much of a hassle for friends and families you want to join in to vote. Think about it - some of the people in the pods would like to vote on the pod but they may not want to go thru the hassle of what you just suggested. KISS - Keep It Short & Simple.

Setting up a new e-mail account doesn't seems like a hassle at all to me, but I was thinking of that option more for the Current regulars. I used to use my main e-mail for Current until they came up with the "invite" a friend option and it got overwhelming.

For the "friends and families you want to join in to vote," I don't think this would be necessary, because they probably wouldn't be getting much, if any, "so-n-so thinks you'll like this" type of stuff anyway.

I'm confused.

Why don't you simply click on the "new" link on the homepage? That is where the submissions appear when they are first posted to Current. Isn't that what you're requesting? I spend as much time looking at the new posts as I do the popular "ones." Just click on "popular" or "new" right under "vote now: you make the news" on the homepage and I think you'll get your "newest story" page.

It works the same for the "viewer uploads" page. Under "vote now for the next $1000 recipient for TV," you have the popular/new option.

Also, there is a way to stop the videos from automatically playing, but admittedly, I haven't tried to tackle that yet. I do wish that the default setting was for videos not to play automatically and if you wanted them to play automatically, then you could set it up that way. It's frustrating to me, because every time you load the next response page it plays the video again. If you make lots of errors like me and need to edit your response three times, that means you also have to watch the video three times. Pausing the darn thing does get old and it's still downloading, even when it's not playing so it's still using up my bandwidth. For me, paying per gigabyte, this gets expensive.

To "see the current ranking of the story on the actual story page" would be awesome.

I think you have some good ideas dabne, but I think some of your wishes have already been granted (if I understood them correctly).

Oops, I guess I should have read the whole thread before commenting, because I'm repeating things others have already said. Sorry :(