The Costs of Requiring Accounts

Re:The Costs of Requiring Accounts by ChuckMcM on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @12:45AM (#29171493)

This (from the article) was unexpected -- Surprisingly, the cost includes “lost” contributions from community members who had accounts already, but whose activity appears to have been catalyzed by the (often low quality) contributions from those without accounts.

So the crappy hot takes that cause the "quality members" respond to with a quality post are a net value to the content quality?

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Re:The Costs of Requiring Accounts by krisrm on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @01:48AM (#29171843)

I'm not certain if you're being tongue-in-cheek or not, but I would think that often this would be positive net-value to content quality. If it takes a troll or a bot to stimulate quality discussion... so be it, I suppose.

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Re:The Costs of Requiring Accounts by vicda on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @02:36AM (#29172079)

sounds like a "The fastest way to get a good answer on Stack Overflow is to post a wrong answer with a second account" type of thing.

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Re:The Costs of Requiring Accounts by jasondigitized on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @10:49AM (#29175984)

The fastest way to get the answer in a organization is to send a email/slack with a wildly inaccurate answer to the question no one wants to answer/respond to. It is even more effective when you attribute the wrong person to it. This is a anti-pattern but it does work.

"Hey everyone, I just heard the Phoenix Project that Jim is leading is going to be completed next week and will be under budget by $5m. I will go ahead and report that up to the VP in my 1x1 today"

You may look stupid but people will get really emotional and give you the real answer you need very quickly.

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Re:The Costs of Requiring Accounts by DeathArrow on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @04:27AM (#29172745)

Because people like to contradict someone more than they like to help someone.

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Re:The Costs of Requiring Accounts by kingcharles on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @11:55AM (#29176963)

This is also a standard LEO interrogation technique.

"Well, son, your buddy just told us you killed her with a hammer."

"NO! It was an axe! I mean... oh, damn.."

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Re:The Costs of Requiring Accounts by mikeiz404 on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @12:13PM (#29177208)

I too found that surprising.

My assumption is that a low quality entry spurs some one to action to edit it and since they are already there they mind as well put effort in to improving it. I still need to read the paper though.

I believe this study was done in the context of wiki entries (Fandom) so I’m not sure if this does, and it may, generalize to conversational forum posts as I think you’re saying.

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Re:The Costs of Requiring Accounts by ec109685 on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @01:52AM (#29171869)

Pretty much this: https://xkcd.com/386/

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