Signal To Noise Ratio

Here's a few reflections that I hope might be somehow helpful.

It seems sites that prosper in the future will do so by mastering the art of blending editorial control with inclusive user participation.

As example, consider YouTube. It's strengths are that it's very inclusive and democratic, and thus contains tons of content. It's weakness is that a great deal of that content is mediocre or junk. Thus, if you want to access the quality content the price tag typically is that you have to have the patience to find it among the tidal wave of low quality content.

This site, and other sites that rely on user content, seem to be in this same signal to noise ratio situation. As example, go to the search feature here, type in your favorite file host, and hit search. How many of the posts then displayed interest you? How many pages of mediocre or worse content are you willing to wade through to find what you consider to be quality content?

All across the Net (not just here) mods are typically pretty diligent about deleting spam and illegal content, which is great. But after that pretty much anybody is allowed to post pretty much anything, and so they do, and most of what is posted isn't all that great. The sheer volume of the "not so great" content has a way of burying the truly good stuff.

I think the sites that succeed in the future will find creative ways to push at least some of the quality content in to the spotlight. As example, a section of the site called something like "Hot Post Of The Day" which contains only posts which the mods have deemed to be quality content. Such a section would likely become quite popular, and thus many posters would try to raise their game to become included, a dynamic which would improve the entire site.

I predict that in the future sites that rely primarily on software and user content are going to fade in popularity. The signal to noise ratio is just too low to be sustainable over the long term.

My 2 cents...

I'm a huge fan of this site. Over time I've developed a sense of who the important posters are for me - SelenaBlue, Paxum, RonnyO - and I return to them religiously. They're curators of excellence who rarely disappoint. So I've found a way, and I'm sure others have too, to amplify the signal and steer around the noise.

Another way to reduce noise here is to do higher level Google searches in the form: https://www.forumophilia.com/ search term1, search term2 which generates hundreds of thumbnails on a page. Much quicker than tediously going through page after page of lengthy posts. The hot chix usually pop out pretty quickly.

Forumophilia also made life a lot easier with the addition of "Exact phrase" search which makes navigation five times easier than at a rival like PlanetSuzy. What's great here is the ability to create an ad hoc thread based on search. I get major wood off searches like "skinny and beautiful", "rare" and "must see". I'd have a much harder time accomplishing the same on You Tube but even there I find recurring topics, if not contributors, that are high payoff for me.


_________________
As soon as a customer gets shot in the ass, Amazon will rethink drones. Don't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their panties. Don't forget to visit my new website: Are You Dumber Than A Pornstar?

Thanks for the great suggestions BigWup, I'll work on learning those. And thanks for participating in this discussion.

Yes, one way to boost the signal to noise ratio would be to give the kind of quality posters you mention a more prominent role on the forum, spotlight and showcase them in some manner. If other posters wished to join that elite group they would have to raise their game to compete.

This idea seems a good compromise between your perspective and mine. Your focus is on technical solutions, and mine is on human editors. Using the idea above the mods would not have to select individual quality posts to showcase, but could instead focus only on identifying quality posters, who would in turn do the content editing.

I agree this is a great forum, but like all forums, hardly one beyond improvement. Like all forums, this one is flooded with junk, and I predict that over time that's going to become more of an obstacle to the success of the site. Some sites are going to face the junk problem and conquer it, and those sites that don't will fall behind.

There's a reason why human editors have dominated all forms of publishing since the dawn of time. Current net culture thinks it can replace human editors with software and user generated content, but I doubt that is true. It was true when the Net was brand new and folks were excited to see anything at all, but we're all going to become more discriminating over time as the Net matures. Imho, a tidal wave of user generated content and a search button just won't cut it as we go forward.

Here's a technical idea brainstorm that perhaps others can improve on.

Imagine that the download links to a file host could be auto-replaced with a redirect link. You click on the redirect link, your click is counted by this site, and then you are redirected to the file host.

(A sophisticated implementation could limit click counting so that once you click the download link for a particular post your IP is not counted for that post again.)

Posts could then be sorted by "most popular". This would remove the subjective definition of "quality" and "junk" and replace that subjective evaluation with hard data of a democratic nature.

Such data would also provide the mods with a way to know who the quality posters actually are, as defined by download frequency. If the mods editorial judgment was challenged they could simply point to the download data to justify their decision to elevate a particular poster to prominence on the forum.

I know enough about coding to know this is technically possible. I of course don't know whether any particular forum owner would find such an investment worthwhile.

Given the huge popularity of phpBB, it's possible such a system already exists and could be simply installed instead of coded from scratch. The phpBB support forum might be a good place to look.

Forumophilia strikes me as hugely successful with 1500 people online at any one time. Download links work 95%, or better, of the time; content is excellent; the moderators have the good sense to keep a low profile. The only real rival is PlanetSuzy which does a great job with porn star threads, but suffers from overbearing moderators and an ingrown community. One only has to look at Intporn and VEF (Vintage Erotica) to see good ideas gone to seed.

Sure, there's lots of boring stuff here, mostly cam-related, but humans are learning animals and I find it hard to believe that people slog through the dull stuff without quickly figuring out strategies to improve their hit ratio.

There's a key functionality that makes Forumophilia ten times easier to navigate than a rival like PlanetSuzy. Searches here create an output that assembles all detected posts in one continuous thread that can be scrolled through. PlanetSuzy on the other hand forces you to open each discovered post separately, quickly inducing insanity.

On the enhancement side, I'd like to see some functionality that could rank thumbnails of the most downloaded scenes. Though that could be akin to determining the most popular soup - everyone likes Chicken Noodle!

Personally, I think Forumophilia is brilliantly curated because the curation is always in evidence while maintaining the lightest of footprints. The big change to my eyes in the last year was the addition of "Exact Search" which was exactly the improvement that was needed.
_________________
As soon as a customer gets shot in the ass, Amazon will rethink drones. Don't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their panties. Don't forget to visit my new website: Are You Dumber Than A Pornstar?