March 20, 2014

Science Fun: Can you identify this drawing?

Yesterday, my 5-year-old son drew this picture at school, and cut it out. When he brought it home he asked me if I knew what it was. I immediately recognized it.

I just had to share. I'm curious if anyone else knows...

March 10, 2014

Should Democratic Underground switch to seven-person juries?

This topic has been discussed a number of times in the Ask the Administrators forum, and the DU Admins have discussed it here in the office repeatedly over the last two years. Currently, if a community standards alert is sent, it is evaluated by a jury of six DU members. Should we increase the number of jurors to seven? This would likely have the following effects:

• There would be no more 3-3 ties. Every alert would result in a majority decision.


• There would be a modest increase in the number of posts that get hidden. If the number of alerts stays constant, and if we assume that approximately half of the current 3-3 ties end up as hides, then the number of additional hidden posts per day would be less than five. Possibly two or three.


• There is a chance that the total number of alerts might increase. Some people have stated that the current difficulty in getting posts hidden acts as a disincentive to send alerts. It is conceivable that alerters might have a greater incentive to alert when the chance of getting a post hidden increases, and would therefore send more.


• Democratic Underground would probably see a modest increase in civility, for two reasons. First, uncivil messages that are posted would be more likely to be removed (and the authors of those posts blocked out of threads). And second, people would be less likely to post uncivil messages in the first place due to the increased likelihood that they could get hidden.


• There might be a modest increase in "misfires" or perceived misfires, in which juries hide posts based on some sort of misunderstanding. This occurs rarely, and would likely remain rare.

The purpose of this poll is to get a sense of the opinion of the community. The DU Administrators will not be bound by the result.

(Note: This poll has two options -- you can either vote to change to seven-person juries, or you can vote to keep six-person juries. If you came to this thread hoping to discuss the merits of the jury system as a whole, I want to make clear that it is here to stay -- we are not getting rid of it.)