Thoughts from the Elm community on Intentional Communication

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@evancz

the traditional ways to build trust in communities did not work anymore. Elaborate rituals developed to try to filter for trustworthiness (clothing, manners, mourning, etc.) but it was always possible to do the rituals disingenuously. So the rituals became more elaborate in hopes of creating a better filter, but those could also be performed disingenuously

I still feel like “time invested” is impossible to do disingenuously, so that filter is still workable. A person who spends 14 days, 30 days, 60 days.. a year.. in a community has a verifiable public track record that can be thoroughly vetted.

The Discourse Trust Level System is an attempt to capture a rough form of this, for example once you get to TL3 (regular) we know you’ve at least…

• visited 50% of the last 100 days
• read 25% of the topics and posts created in the last 100 days
• replied to at least 10 topics in the last 100 days

(among other things, see the above link for more specifics)

That does not speak to post quality, of course, or whether the poster has overall positive or negative contributions via their posts, either. That takes human (and community) judgment.