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RE: Updated thoughts on 'the whale experiment'
Doesn't the experiment make people less inclined to write well thought out posts which require more time? If you get flagged just because what you wrote was interesting doesn't that beat the purpose of putting an effort in the first place? I feel it is very demotivating.
The same thing could be said about writing content and never getting 'discovered' by a whale. There were lots of posts about that before the experiment. There are still lots of high paying posts - even after they receive flags. (Check out the trending page.) The difference is that the high paying posts now are the ones that have lots of dolphin votes.
So you believe that this has a positive effect on the 'quality'?
It's a great question. I don't have data on that, so I don't really k. As a long term thing though - if/when the site scales to billions of users, a wider group of individuals (dolphins and minnow) are going to be able to do a much better job evaluating quality than having a small handful of ~50 users doing all the evaluations and decisions themselves.
That is true. I doubt 'quality' was the leading factor when they voted anyway.