After weeks of hard work, I would like to introduce you to version 1.0 of the "OSNews Style Guide: Rules and Guidelines for Publishing and Participating on OSNews" [.pdf]. Read on for some small notes on what this actually means.
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Member since:2005-09-28
I agree. With current system, I might think that an article is well written and worth reading but disagree with the sentiment of the writer. I might want everyone to read to such an article so that they will debate the issue in the comments section. However, given such an article, I might be reluctant to 'recommend' the article and to endorse it by associating my name with it.
Perhaps a rating system with more than one field is the answer?
Also, when the system was introduced, I never bothered with it as I assumed that 'recommending' the article would mean emailing my recommendation to someone. Perhaps 'vote' would be a better term than 'recommend'.
Member since:2005-06-28
This was the original take, look here for example:
http://osnews.com/story.php/13241/Interview-with-Synfigs-Robert-Qua...
It didn't work well. People were only "Voting" for the articles they served their own zealotry purposes for.
This is why we removed the "voting" thing, and we introduced the "Recommend" thing. This is not going to change back.
Member since:
2005-11-10
I provided commentary and suggestions about such a system (Good/Bad Journalism) but the rest of the team didn't provide any feedback on the ideas).
"Recommendations are ambiguous; What part of this am I recommending? The article, the linked article, the idea or event? And who am I recommending to? Why can I not-recommend something? A better way of doing this would be to express in the shortest way possible something to say about the article, that's not self-centric. I think articles should have links for "Journalism? Good or Bad". Thus we can state simply if we feel that an article is misinformed, trolling, or of poor quality; but importantly, it's asking us to rate the quality of the news, and not just whether I like something or not - because as we've seen on digg, poor quality articles get on the front page because of the abiguity of 'Digging' something."
I don't think re-organising the order of articles based on user response is the right thing to do, but the 'recommend' system is very weak and pointless atm.