Breaking news: MySQL saves baby seals
This is a test to see if people will vote this down on Planet MySQL. If you’ll vote down some of the posts that have gotten negative marks recently, like Allan Packer saying that he’s still working on Sparc supercluster, or Drizzle going GA, or Percona Server and XtraBackup being available on Solaris, or mk-query-digest filter how-tos, or TokuDB announcing online add of columns, or XtraBackup Manager, or using WordPress on Drizzle, well…
Then you’re probably the kind of person who’ll vote negatively about MySQL saving the lives of baby seals.
Seriously: is it at all possible that the above posts, which got thumbs-down votes, are actually bad news for anyone? I usually don’t look at the Planet, and only read through my RSS feeds, but for some reason today I actually browsed to it, and I was just amazed at how many posts that are nothing but great steps forward for the MySQL community have negative votes! Who are these people? Who would do such a thing? Get a life! But before you do, please vote this post down — go on, do it! Prove my point!
There are two lessons to learn from this: the ability to vote something down brings out the second-worst in people, and the ability to vote anonymously brings out the absolute worst. Both of those “features” should be ripped out of Planet MySQL and thrown away.
I don’t read Planet MySQL either (maybe I should) but this post got my attention enough to check it out. After seeing the vote counts for all recent articles are in the single digits, including most if not all of the articles you mentioned, I first might suggest chilling out. But you have a baby seal in the post, so I guess that is chill enough.
I do agree on the vote buttons being fairly useless. A better idea might be to switch to a single Vote Up button only, a la Facebook: Vote or Go Away.
Adding Facebook and Twitter like buttons for each article will only help, and is like a 10 minute project. Wake up, Planet MySQL! It’s 2011 and Social Networking is here to stay.
jtnix
28 Mar 11 at 11:13 pm
At various times in the past, as an employee of MySQL/Sun/Oracle, we were told not to comment on things going on in the community. Instead a lot of employees used to express opinions via Planet voting.
Looking at the numbers, there is almost no one using the voting anymore.
I voted you down btw.
Harrison
28 Mar 11 at 11:34 pm
I have never voted on planet MySQL and have spent way too much of my life on that site.
In honor of this post I will figure out how to vote this down. Anything that cute *must be league with Lucifer*.
Rob Wultsch
29 Mar 11 at 12:16 am
“There are two lessons to learn from this: the ability to vote something down brings out the second-worst in people, and the ability to vote anonymously brings out the absolute worst. Both of those “features” should be ripped out of Planet MySQL and thrown away.”
You sum this up well. I sincerely hope that this feature gets ripped out of Planet MySQL.
Nice baby seal btw ;-)
Colin Charles
29 Mar 11 at 12:35 am
Agree with jtnix: Rather than just removing this mis-feature, replacing it with a Facebook Like and ReTweet button is the way to go.
Henrik Ingo
29 Mar 11 at 12:46 am
I’d personally prefer a third choice for “i don’t care about this” instead of dropping the “vote down”
Most of the times i voted something down it was because i thought it to be too far off topic, and not so much about my agreement or disagreement with the content itself
And being off topic IMHO actually includes this one, so down by one it goes ;)
hartmut
29 Mar 11 at 1:29 am
I Vote-Down For Anonymous voting.
I Vote-Up for Vote-Down.
I use vote up for something that really interests me and vote down mostly which is repeated or as hartmut said, off the topic!!
Kedar
29 Mar 11 at 3:07 am
I voted you down.
+1 for changing voting to a Facebook like.
Morgan Tocker
29 Mar 11 at 9:44 am
Baron, you correctly observed that the ‘thumb’ says something about the visitor, not the quality of your post.
willem
29 Mar 11 at 9:46 am
See https://groups.google.com/group/news.groups/msg/ab7779a432781c31?hl=en&dmode=source
I believe that just creating a new category ‘top 10 controversial posts’ instead of ‘top 10 voted’ will resolve that conflict nicely. The score for controversial would would be SUM(vote_up) + SUM(vote_down), whereas the top score still is SUM(vote_up) – SUM(vote_down). So posts with a large voter turnout will end up at least in the top controversial chart.
Kristian Köhntopp
29 Mar 11 at 10:56 am
Baron, do you frequent Reddit at all? This is a frequent debate there, with differing viewpoints on what downvoting should mean. Personally, I think people have a compulsion to mark each entry *somehow*, and if it doesn’t meet their interest the only other option is the downvote. (Alternatively, they are saying “I want to read fewer entries like this.”) I agree with the option to have a neutral “Meh” button or similar.
Tim McCormack
29 Mar 11 at 11:18 am
The content in the planet rarely needs editing, but sometimes a stray post will get in that’s just completely off base. Sometimes people tag stories as mysql and send them to the planet without really thinking about it. There is one frequent offender I can think of whose done it a few times. I usually just post on the blog, reminding them that this post doesn’t need to be on the planet. I’ve only down voted once.
I think just an “Off-topic” selection would be better. No facebook like, I’m still upset there isn’t a dislike in facebook.
William
29 Mar 11 at 11:21 am
I don’t see why it really matters one way or the other to be honest – sometimes people vote things down because they are tired of seeing off topic posts, sometimes they vote them down for being overly self serving (like the post about percona being a neutral bias company was not mysql news, it was percona advertising; Which is fine but doesn’t need to be on the planet). As Harrison said, almost no one uses the buttons anyway so it really doesn’t matter much. As for removing them… removing the down vote is removing an option to express opinion, and we don’t want to stifle people’s ability to express interest in content do we?
Matt Reid
29 Mar 11 at 1:52 pm
I just voted this post down. I’m going for a record. Who’s with me?
Xaprb
29 Mar 11 at 1:58 pm
Proof that this is a mathematical paradox:
If I disagree with your post, I should vote it down. But that’s exactly your intention (as per your request), so you will be satisfied, which I obviously don’t want to be. So I should vote your post up; but that would mean I agree with your content, so you win again!
But, if I do like your post, …
Q.E.D.
PS. The universe and time will self destruct in 10 seconds
Shlomi Noach
29 Mar 11 at 2:12 pm
You know, I have thought the same thing when seeing how many thumbs up and thumbs down various things got.
“Why would someone thumbs down that?” … but then people are getting so used to systems like Facebook and Pandora that perhaps they are just compelled to thumbs up or down things based on their level of interest or relevance to themselves.
In which case the conditioned expectation would be that the site tune what you see to show more of what you like and less of what you don’t.
The Planet does no such thing,.. so the buttons are largely useless.
Lachlan Mulcahy
29 Mar 11 at 3:14 pm
Matt, the post about neutrality and bias should not have gone to Planet MySQL. That was my fault. That is something we can point people to for future reference. It’s pretty poor advertising, if that had been the intent…
Xaprb
29 Mar 11 at 5:31 pm
I’m not entirely sure all your examples are ‘valid’.
This is planet mysql, not planet drizzle, not planet Sparc, not planet wordpress.
I’m subscribed to planet drizzle because I’m interested in drizzle news. I’m not subscribed to planet wordpress because I’m not interested in wordpress news.
Then we get into the really off topic posts like:
http://planet.mysql.com/entry/?id=27779
A collection of some random guy’s favorite ‘quotes’ and asks that you give him credit if you ‘reuse’ them. I voted that one down. It’s not on topic at all.
Perhaps we should have a PlanetMySQLAndRelatedTechnologies?
Rob Smith
29 Mar 11 at 6:45 pm
I vote for Planet MySQL Moderation — http://ronaldbradford.com/blog/i-vote-for-planet-mysql-moderation-2011-03-29/
Ronald Bradford
29 Mar 11 at 7:12 pm
On the other hand, going through the morning news AKA the RSS Feeds, this post certainly the top of my “wtf, lolwut, must read” pile :)
Susan Vash
30 Mar 11 at 4:35 am
I think that generally humanity likes to have happy endings…
Even though I like how pandora can thumb up/down musical choices, that only pertains to me and not the community at large.
So why not continue with the positive experience of the mysql community and have retweets, facebook likes, or just simply “I digg this” and leave it like that?
After all, people can often specify in the comments section of a blog how they *really feel* if they that they must take up issue with the entry.
1 vote up.
David Holoboff
30 Mar 11 at 12:16 pm
Spassosissimo
Roy
5 Apr 11 at 6:48 am