As far as I can tell, dog-piling in the context of this thread is more about being overwhelmed by separate replies which appear to request responses. I don’t see that the board needs to be concerned with dog-piling in the sense of numbers of people who disagree with your post who do not expect or require individual attention. The issue here appears to be respond to these X separate requests and not a ton of people think you’re full of shit.
If Razd, makes a post to some third party, requesting a response, and I post as little as, I’d like to know that as well. Then the person usually feels some pressure to respond to both of us. Even if the response to me is as little as, Read my reply to Razd it takes extra effort. If instead Razd marks a post as a strawman and I click on, ‘I agree’, the OP doesn’t have to respond to me at all. The OP and other forum members can simply see that more than one person seems to think there’s an issue. Since in this context the person doesn’t have to reply to me, and either wouldn’t be able to even if they wished (or would have to go out of their way to include me) this seems clearly to me to be less dog-piling in the sense of overwhelming people with replies.
Allowing people to participate in threads without creating additional work for posters does IMO tend to decrease dog-piling.
I’m using ‘flags’ in the sense that programmers use the term (it is a throwback to when I used to program games and we’d ‘flag’ and item as invisible, or some such), the more correct term today would be ‘properties’.
I’m not familiar with Topix, so way out on a limb I’d say we’re talking about different implementations or perhaps they simply have a poor implementation. There are all manner of ‘voting’ systems. All are not equal. Vote weighting can address some of the issues I think you have.
Educated person responds:
"That doesn't make any sense, even within the narrow context of your religious belief."
Then 47 Creationists mark the response as "lemon".
Isn’t this exactly the system we have currently (replace ‘lemon’ with ‘thumbs down’)?
Not all posters need to have the same privileges, nor does every poster have to add the same weight when voting. If I was redesigning this site software (and no I’m not saying this is either the only way to do this or even that it would be the best) I would seriously consider tracking bias of participants. I agree with you that it seems that much of the ‘voting’ here is political. Perhaps, minimizing the effect of this is something worthwhile.
Whether or not whatever is being posted is a strawman, you'll see people marking it strawman. Then you have admins trying to go back and correct labels. Then you have people arguing with admins about why it's not a strawman, or why it is a strawman.
Outside of style, these forums seem to contain only a handful of features I don’t remember seeing in the mid 1990s. I’m not even sure that the CompuServe forums couldn’t tell you which were direct responses to a post you made. Admins trying to control all forum behavior simply isn’t as needed with some additional programming.
One way to implement better social sites is to use ‘trusted users’. The admins by consensus assign trusted users (this should be done at the category level). Once enough trusted users are found (whatever the programmer sets it to) the rest of the population and the admins themselves are evaluated against the first group. The entire user list is reevaluated at intervals and becomes self-correcting. Consensus of trusted individuals becomes filter for all other votes. In such a system you damage your own ability to impact votes by voting against the trusted users.
In such a system, you can try to argue with the Admins, but since the decisions are more in the hands of the community often they’re just going to tell you to convince the other posters.
As a side note, think of all the cool java script charts that could be implemented in such a system. Tracking change of voting, geography, etc.
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