Opinionated posts: let’s be open-minded for a moment

Question

This is going to be the first of a few posts I’m going to make regarding our rules system and how we might be able to make some changes that will sustain this site going forward.

I think it’s pretty well known around here that this site’s activity has been waning of late. General activity and interest in this site has dropped a ton since our peak years in 2012 to 2014, and in turn the dynamic of this site has changed a lot. This calls for us to discuss how we can stop this site completely stagnating in the near future.

The way I see it, the biggest factor in sustaining PokeBase long-term is going to be our rules and quality control. I’ve been working on something for a long time that will hopefully address this idea in detail, but before we get to that, I want to ask you all...

Can we make opinionated content work on this site?

Again, as with my last post, bear with me: don’t turn your nose up at the concept just because that’s how we’ve always done it. The point of me doing this at all is to question our traditions and promote progression. Without that, we stagnate and interest drops as we’ve seen for the past few years. We should be open-minded to new content for this site.

As with my last post, I want to make some distinctions between different types of content. If you’re not one for the analysis and wordiness, the salient point of my discussion is this: opinionated posts perhaps aren’t the problem, and the current ‘polls/opinions’ rule is missing the point.

Before I get into this, I want to make it very clear what kinds of questions I’m talking about. Many opinionated questions are super trivial and low-quality, like ‘What is a good nickname for Charizard?’ I’ll make it clear now: I’m not advocating for crap like this to be allowed, and I don’t believe floury questions of that sort will ever have a place here.

But it’s very easy to lump an interesting question like, ‘Is capturing Pokémon ethical?’ into the same category on the basis of both being opinionated. This is the restrictive approach of our rules system — is it really in our interest? This question isn’t low quality and would bring some fresh ideas to the site. This is why I want to entertain allowing some of these posts.

There’s a clear obstacle here though, which is that this question doesn’t fit our traditional structure where it should be possible to resolve a question with one answer. But once again, I’m challenging traditions like this: is this really a bad thing? A question like the one I gave above will eventually be exhausted of new ideas to bring up, unlike a truly ‘open-ended’ question. Then it can be moderated like the rest of our posts, where any answer that doesn’t add new ideas will be removed. Our current structure doesn’t have to be the only one that works.

The way I’m seeing it right now, some opinionated questions (i.e. no clear answer) aren’t ‘open-ended’ like we try to prevent, but will clearly have more longevity than the majority of our content. Once again, I think a separate decision needs to be made here. Is this something we can allow here, does it give precedence for other super low-quality questions to exist? Does it clash with our platform too much?

Of course, if we revise the current ‘opinion/polls’ rule, we’ll need to replace it with something more particular to the stuff we still don’t want. Keeping the part about polls would probably keep a lot of the shallow stuff away, and adding a part about purely open-ended posts will help us maintain the structure of our site. Maybe add a part about vague wording for good measure, and I think there’s a workable solution if we’re willing to allow this new content.

Thoughts? I’m not convinced of either perspective personally, so I’m curious to know everyone else thinks. I encourage some responses as answers instead of comments, as I think this will make a better discussion.

^{Thanks JarJar for being a massive bother to moderate pushing this idea enough I’d make a post from it.}

Comments

How is it more interesting than the prospect of banning discussion about ORAS and getting to the real root cause of our problem?

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Shhhhhh sumwun
I thought we weren't talking about the forbidden games

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I know you’re joking (probably lol?) but I actually do think there’s a correlation between our decline and a certain event in history... it’s definitely not OR/AS, but it does warrant its own discussion. I’ll touch on it once I’m done with the rules and such. It relates to another area I think this site needs to improve on.

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Our niche of high quality answering falls apart when you realize these sites also have high quality answers, it's not like on any other forum you'll get nothing of value

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As far as I'm aware, none of those sites have an unanswered list. We are set apart by the presence of an unanswered list.

Answer 1

Good question, and I'm not sure I have a clear answer one way or the other. My gut says a question like "Is capturing Pokémon ethical?" does not quite fit our current system. I would categorise this as a "debate" question rather than an "opinion/poll question", it's sort of in-between Q&A and a Forum.

On the Q&A side:

• Our current format would (or should) encourage longer, more detailed answers.
• While you might have two answers with opposing views, they can be equally good answers to the question. And there's no reason someone couldn't answer with a balanced answer showing both sides.
• Voting can show which answer is better-reasoned (though in practice it may just show what's more popular with the crowd).

On the Forum side:

• There is better chance of an actual debate. Posts may be shorter, but there is more back-and-forth, more people can give their reasoning. With the current Q&A system you can't have a good discussion in the comments.
• Discussion can go on longer. For the most part, Pokebase questions are "finished" after a few days or weeks.
• At the end of the day, it's still opinion and there probably is no best answer.

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With regard to forums, I think it's basically inevitable we will have forums at some point, it's mainly a question of when I get the time to fix up the Q2A software to work like a forum (I don't think installing some other forum software like phpBB is a viable option, for many reasons I won't go into).

I started Pokebase to have something different to a regular forum. We were still a small site and it didn't seem worth duplicating what was on other sites. I think we've achieved that - even if the activity is lower than it's peak, it's still higher than when we started. And most of all, many of our questions are somewhat timeless - they still receive a lot of visits from non-members (via Google searches) and help people find answers quickly.

I added the chat room to try and cover the use cases of a forum but it didn't really do that. Chat became its own thing and still left a gap in the middle that a forum would solve (discussing things, but not needing to all be online at the same time).

I've considered adding a poll section as well, which would be another copy of the Q2A software but allowing open-ended questions where people can vote on the answers (favourite Pokemon, good nicknames, etc).

What happens when someone asks a question in the forum area that would be suited to the Q&A?

This is not a problem from a technical view. I actually made a feature already that can move questions from Pokebase to Meta or RMT. It was quite rudimentary though and I never got around to opening it up to mods.

The main question is, will this become a huge pain in the butt? If the forum becomes popular, will people just forget about the Q&A and keep asking questions on the forum? And then we have the debate like your original question here, what should be on the forum and what should be on Pokebase?

It's a tough one to figure out. I guess the only way to know is to go ahead and make the forum, right?!

Comments

Thanks as always for the response, glad everyone’s putting some time into these discussions. I think we’ve pretty much exhausted the topic of things to bring up, which is really good.
Might have been apparent from the tone of my follow-up, but I think I’m pretty much in agreement these threads would be an awkward fit. I want to have them around for sure, but I guess it will just come back to the question of how we’re going to split content between the Q&A and a forum, and how the voting and ‘best answer’ systems probably don’t agree with non-objective content.
In general I think a forum is something we’ll need tons of preparation for, since you’re right, it may very well dwarf the main area we’ve had so long. To be honest I think the whole system would look strange and convoluted to a new user coming into a site who just wants to discuss Pokémon, without mods getting in the way moving and policing stuff. We should try to be as enticing to new users as possible — I feel like messing the site with multiple platforms would sort of forfeit that.
I guess another option could be to merge the Q&A into the forum infrastructure and just move on, though that would be a bit of a shame. But in fact, meta and RMT are better off as forums to begin with — maybe that could be something to look into first?
BTW, how do you envisage the forum working in terms of the points and voting systems, and everything else? It would be really nice to keep them around, perhaps in the form of a public ‘liking’ system that accumulates reputation. Would it also entail a CSS revamp? I could potentially lend a hand with that if there was a way to sandbox/demo the new structure (e.g. local host?)

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I don’t think I would merge the Q&A into the forum as it defeats the purpose of Q&A. From the perspective of someone asking a question, a forum can work because they ask a question, discuss with others then get an answer at the end. But for other people who have the same question, they may have to wade through 20 posts to find the answer. Q&A means the answer is right there.

The original intention with the forum was to convert the RMT section, as many people have asked it just be a forum. There is rarely one correct answer, RMT involves more discussion.

Meta is slightly different, many of the posts here are better suited to questions - but some would work as a forum too (eg: this question). Suggestions/corrections may work better as separate ‘threads’ in its own section. So maybe Meta and RMT can be merged into the forum, or perhaps we have some other ‘FAQ’ type system with answers about the rules and so on.

In terms of points, my initial thought was to only have 1 point per post, because I wasn’t sure if there was another way to show how many posts a user has. We may have a ‘likes’ system where you can ‘thumbs up’ a good or funny post, but they wouldn’t gain points.

Yes it would require a new layout. I’d most likely do the basics but you could suggest improvements if you wanted.

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Right, got it. With merging the platforms I was sort of alluding to the possibility of doing away with the Q&A format entirely, though I can see how that would introduce as many problems and drawbacks as it fixes.
I think it would be nice if we had the main Q&A section, then the three forum-type areas to support it. So maybe RMT, meta and discussion sections. Then we have a place for pretty much everything — a fair amount of the stuff we disallow in the Q&A would probably work on a forum area. Completely adding the feature to move between sections would be amazing, I think that and a forum would do a lot to move the community forward.
If there’s anything we can do to help out with the process, let us know. Maybe when the forum reaches a point when it’s at least usable, we could test it out like we did in 2013 with the redesign — report errors and make suggestions, and such.

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Slightly late to the party, but I have a few questions, mostly to PM.

What is the purpose of this site?
Whom is the site intended for? What is the target demographic, age wise?
How does the site generate revenue? Is it making a loss/gain? To what end does revenue play into how the site is run? Do we want more page views, or do we need more page views?
To what end does user contribution helpful or required? To that end, what sort of contribution is expected? How can the average user (well, Experts and above, who want to chip in as much as possible) contribute to this site? For example, if a user wants to submit fan-art or artwork or something of the sort, how far would it be of use, aside from entertainment?
What can we do that separates us from r/Pokemon?
How big is our active user base? How big are guest visits?
Should there be a decision for a massive site reformat, what should users (newer and older) look forward to?

Assuming a forum is created, to what extent will it be policed? For example, will swear words be allowed/censored?

Honestly, the biggest "competition" are Smogon and Serebii information depth wise, but r/Pokemon has a much higher user base of the more casual type of discussion, because Reddit is huge. Anyone (any Reddit user) can subscribe to r/Pokemon and the tens of related subreddits and participate without having to create accounts or deal with the regular hassle that Pokemon only sites tend to have. Plus a lot of people are active on Reddit at any given time, so if they have a question they just pop off to the relevant subreddit and get a quick answer. How can we compare to such an unrestricted behemoth?

Do we want a bigger site? Looking at the discussion so far, these were some of the things that popped into my head. I was wondering what our ultimate "aim" is, and how productive/effective it is in the long run.

Answer 2

As I said guys, nice discussion and thanks for putting in the effort. I wanted to write something with regards to opinionated posts perhaps not matching our site’s purpose or niche, which I think is a really good point in opposition to this. For argument’s sake, I’m going discuss how we could still have a face in the crowd even if we allow more forum-style content.

I agree allowing this type of content would change what this site is fundamentally, and I think drawing the parallel with Reddit is helpful considering how alike our platform is. But in terms of the overall content we encourage here, and how the platform differs from a normal forum, I think it’s possible to make this work without turning into a copy of another site.

You could argue that functionally, you might have a similar experience asking individual things on a forum or on r/pokemon. But frequenting this site will almost surely be a different experience to frequenting a site like that. Forums allow all sorts of content, and often the point of them is to sustain the exact same endless posts that we would ban on a site like this. On Reddit, a lot of the content is original work and news aggregation, which we don’t allow. As such, the experience here is going to be concentrated on the questions, which is our point of difference from those sites. I don’t think opinionated posts will take that away from us.

But there’s still a lot to be said about what type of site we want to be, irrespective of whether it’s original. Right now we value objectivity and we don’t cross into matters where there ‘best answer’ isn’t clear cut. Allowing opinionated questions means the concept of a ‘best answer’ is pretty much irrelevant — to use my previous example, there is no correct way to answer ‘Is Pokémon ethical?’ You would explain your particular stance in your answer, but it’s not inherently any more or less valid to the next answer that opposes yours. As Rex mentioned, this is also part of what defines our site.

We have a very obvious right-or-wrong system — is this something we change, or can we find a way to keep our content fresh without it? Does it clash with a platform that actively seeks to find a ‘best answer’?

Forums are an interesting approach to this as well. They’re a step in the direction of having new content and sustaining a well-rounded community, which is something we’re pretty average at as Finchwidget mentioned. But if we’re going to talk about our site’s purpose, then I think we have to discuss how a forum and Q&A can coexist in the same site without overlap.

What happens when someone asks a question in the forum area that would be suited to the Q&A? Why separate all our content for the sake of the platform, when we can just have it all together in one place? We’d have to be really careful implementing this. We’d definitely need a way to move threads across sections, as a start — though that would be nice right now as well.

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This has clearly devolved into a ramble, so I’ll TL;DR this now. Irrespective of whether our site can have a niche allowing opinionated questions, do they actually fit our platform? It’s supposed to find a ‘best answer’ that is hard to define for opinionated posts, but at the same time, allowing new content has a lot of upside. Do we bite? Is there some other way we can approach this?