Low Quality Contributions

[Deleted member 7467]

I'm not going to define low quality contributions as each community is different. What I want to do is discuss how you, as a forum owner/staff member, would navigate a user that consistently makes low quality contributions. Do you ignore the contributions because it's activity? Do you address the user? Discourage them from participating (nicely of course)? Create more content to mask the lower quality content? How would you address user complaints if this user meant no harm but just didn't have the depth of knowledge to contribute higher quality postings? What impact could a chronic low quality contributor make on a forum?

(I'm not referencing blatant spam. I'm talking about genuine activity that just happens to also be extremely low quality.)

 

[Katrina]

On CH low quality could be considered someone who replies, "I agree" with nothing to back up why. It can be annoying for sure but there isn't much we can do beyond ask the member "why" and try to continue the conversation and the reason I say that is because that's just how some members are in their posts. I'm not sure if it's because they don't feel they have anything else to add to the conversation but still feel the need to voice an opinion or what.

 

[Deleted member 49125]

I just posted something similar in Most Topics
My forum is still quite new & even tho it’s holistic, many are not into that so many of the posts are for general chat.
If a forum is big enough, the lower quality posts won’t stand out as much as the quality posts.
Another perspective, what one constitutes low quality, another may think it’s fine. A poster posting those may honestly be doing what they can & may not feel comfortable expanding on an answer. I’m an introvert lol so I tend to write a lot & delve into deeper discussions.

 

[Shannon Apple]

When we had a large bustling forum with 100s, maybe even 1000s of posts per day, we used to simply reminded users that posting "I agree" and nothing else is post count spam. If they continued doing it, we'd delete their posts until they learned. We also put in a minimum character limit to encourage people to actually write a sentence. Sometimes those I agrees would kill a really good thread and anger the regulars when there were several of them, so deleting those and making a post ourselves would bring the topic back on track.

With a small forum, you can't really afford to run around deleting all these posts. You can encourage the user to elaborate on what they agree on and try to steer them into actually having a conversation with other members instead of "fly by" commentary. Sometimes the members themselves might step in if they see a new user doing it a lot... " Look we don't care if you agree, we want to know why you agree otherwise why bother posting two word replies everywhere. It adds nothing to the discussion." Oops. Sometimes crude can be effective though, but doesn't look good if it comes from staff.

 

[MrDawn]

On CH low quality could be considered someone who replies, "I agree" with nothing to back up why. It can be annoying for sure but there isn't much we can do beyond ask the member "why" and try to continue the conversation and the reason I say that is because that's just how some members are in their posts. I'm not sure if it's because they don't feel they have anything else to add to the conversation but still feel the need to voice an opinion or what.

I've seen posts like that before on other forums! Especially those who do post exchanges. They'll join the forum and do the least amount of work that they can get away with and they'll spam short posts like that and not even give reasons like you pointed out. Or you just have those members who are just posting to post to raise their post count. I'd prefer if they actually wrote a few sentences. But sometimes just 2 to 3 words.

 

[Jason76]

I believe in freedom of speech and if someone feels like, "Yeah, sounds good" then go for it, unless they are trying to spam in a link in the signature or they want cheap points in some "make money via posting" or posting exchange thing.

 

[MrDawn]

I believe in freedom of speech and if someone feels like, "Yeah, sounds good" then go for it, unless they are trying to spam in a link in the signature or they want cheap points in some "make money via posting" or posting exchange thing.

I am the same. But unfortunately Freedom of Speech is nonexistent on private platforms and that strongly applies on the Internet if you read about what Twitter and Facebook does to their members who pass on information that they don't agree. Twitter deleted Trump's page and Facebook censored Kevin Sorbo. It's a shame really.

First Amendment constraints don’t apply to private platforms, Supreme Court affirms

The case had caused concern for some online speech advocates

www.theverge.com