40 posts and I'm still a newbie?

Miscellaneous Topics
#21

[quote]Why do people actually care about their status (Newbie, God, etc.) anyways? It doesn’t really say anything (unless you starting hitting the 5000s or something like that)…
[/quote]
That’s more like a psychological/sociological question :stuck_out_tongue: I agree with you that it doesn’t really say anything, moreover people shouldn’t give much importance to status within a community. But, many people would argue that social recognition is vital to many aspects of one’s success, and humankind’s too as a whole. It’s not enough to make a good videogame, and sell it anonymously. You mostly want to attach your name to the game, (if you think is good), because sometimes only you and your mom knowing that you achieved something is not enough to keep you going.

It’s not very wise to care too much about what others think, but it’s nevertheless understantable that people want other people’s respect in areas that they devote their lives to. Be that in professional golf or in the pub near their house. But note that status is just the reflection of one’s attitude, there’s nothing wrong with it by itself. Only when people become too much aware of that, and think it of as a label that things can go in the wrong way.

One of these days, I watched a lecture by Mandelbrot (from mitworld.mit.edu) and one can see that he is very arrogant and he said at least 10 times about the fact that he was the one who coined the term fractal. That really annoined me, and I didn’t understand why it wasn’t enought to have coined the term and ‘period’. But maybe some people just take acknowedgements of their work very serisouly, and the bottom line is that people are free to advertise their work in any way they like. Hopefully the type of advertisement will not affect their work, but only the image you have of their values.

::slight_smile:

#22

Hahahaha. But you can see that the easter eggs only work for old verions of microsoft office and so on… I found that link via this hilarious article: http://www.biznix.org/whylinux/windows/easter.html – quite old too. I wonder if that was actually a problem inside Microsoft, and how managers could stop people from putting code into products.

#23

Tbh, I don’t think anyone actually does. Its a just another jokey type thing for people to make fun of. Its normally pretty evident from what the poster writes (and in what style) whether its worth taking on board.

Kev

#24

[quote]Why do people actually care about their status (Newbie, God, etc.) anyways? It doesn’t really say anything (unless you starting hitting the 5000s or something like that)…
[/quote]
It’s part of a suite of psychological tricks to build, grow, support, and retain communities. Bulletin boards are normally setup by people intending to build a community, so they come with some of these tricks built-in (although, notably, most aren’t very good at it - this one (YABB) really ****s-up in many ways due to naivety or incompetence by the programmers).

Basically, the status one serves several purposes:

[] Increases people’s emotional attachment to the board (note: “churn” is the biggest single problem faced by communities, after growth). This is true of everyone, subconsciously, unless they fight it hard :slight_smile:
[] Sets up “gurus” within the community, by making their status explicit. I’m not talking about the title, I’m talking about the number of posts. If you saw an argument between me and someone with 5 posts, and neither of us had mentioned any background (e.g. “I founded THQ”) then you’d be inclined to use the number of posts to decide who to trust. (nb: this is not true for everyone, a lot of us are too cynical for that - but it does work for others). NB: it’s not intended to help the “gurus” win arugments! The point is that it helps the community (especially new members! Allowing them to “hit the ground running”…) to understand who it’s most influential members are, and this has well-documented positive effects on the growth, retention, and “spirit” of the community, creating virtuous circles.
[] Makes it easier for board admins to find potential recruits for moderator status etc - i.e. free, unpaid employees who will work tirelessly to help build the community. A lot of BB’s these days have a default config that when you reach XXX posts you automatically become a moderator! In fact, I believe this is how the potential moderators for this board were solicited: just grab the list of all users with > X posts. It’s easy, and tends to work pretty well.
[] …and there are several more as well IIRC but I think you get the general idea :slight_smile:

Incidentally, the “built-in” psych tricks of this board are probably behind the fact that the forums continue for most people to be the main access point for jgo.org. Chris et al have not been trying to build a community around jgo (I say this based on their previous posts which make clear they have other priorities), but the authors of YABB had already built a lot of community support in - so the board continues to have a tendency to much greater community interest. FYI, this isn’t merely because it’s an interactive medium - I’ve seen (and helped build) web-based systems which were as interactive as this forum without having a forum of their own; careful community mgmt can outstrip simple interactive media.