More on Thoof
On launch day, Thoof was terrible. The day after, there was hope. The community was quite quick to tag spam as such, and my sugestions for improvements also went through quickly. This is a very powerful mechanic: it makes me feel smarter than the person who originally posted that story. On other sites, seeing stories that aren’t up to your standards are a turn-off, but when you can do something about it and your suggestion is welcomed, it’s a nice pat on the back that motivates you to submit more improvements. There are more nice details I could mention, e.g. how they avoid karma whoring, but there’s no time and no space for that. I’ve got too much to complain about. Two major hiccups. At first I was frustrated because even though the spam tags came swiftly and plentiful, I still saw all the respective stories. Many of them are gone now, but not all. Come on. Every single story that I’ve read and that was tagged ‘spam’ was deemed ‘not interesting’ by me. And the other tags of these stories are similar, too. It’s not like the ones that still seep through contain classic nex bait, such as ‘ludology’ or ‘programming’. So, really, the only reasonable thing to do is yank a story the moment it’s tagged ‘spam’. Second hiccup: The idea that you just click what you like, and you’ll get more stories you like. It’s a good idea in principle, but the implementation is still flawed. At first I had great understanding for the decision that you can only say “do not want” after you’ve opened a story. The description might be enough to turn you off, but what if the description is wrong? And anyways, never clicking a link is a vote against it anyways. The ‘not interesting’ function is for when you did click the link and then want to cancel that vote because you realized it was a mistake. However, I’m still getting old stories that have already scrolled by my discerning eyes many times and were neglected each and every time. They don’t belong there any more, as long as I’m logged in. But, there’s no way to explicitly tell Thoof about that. Saying ‘not interested’ in such cases is worse than useless: Firstly, if my guess is correct there, all it does is cancel a vote you didn’t want to make in the first place. And secondly, you’d have to generate another page hit for a site you dislike. Even if you’ve already seen that page (say, through digg), and are certain that you’ve seen it because your browser colours that link as ‘visited’. And why show me old stuff at all? If I want to see collections of links carefully accumulated over weeks and months, I go to del.icio.us. Got nothing new? Admit it. An almost empty page might make me submit new stories. A page full of crap certainly won’t. What the above two hiccups have in common is that Thoof is knowingly flinging crap at you. It’s one thing to open the front page of a chronologically ordered site (/., bb, whatever) and discover that you’ve seen most or all of it already, but arranging the duds in ever new permutations, perhaps interspersed with a few morsels you might like to pick out, now that’s just cruel.
