Upvotes / Downvotes on Chess.com

I am curious why they chose play to continue with? I suppose it's newer and faster?

Play was developed to replace the old interface.

i like how hammer basically scares the staff members a lot, he aint afraid to curse them out which i kind of am sad but like as well lol, in response to lichess i think its good tho

Shouldn't really matter, you've played 4 games this year

The site has multiple developers doing a lot of different work. Play was realeased in beta a year and a half ago and has been available for everyone most of this year. In that time the site has added other feature and worked in bug fixes too. 

Every feature and bug gets their own priority, but the site can still do work on both.

yeah we can totally tell they're doing work on it.

You know, not like theyre wasting time on pointless things on upvotes or flares... oh wait..

Chess.com has done what now?

This might be my first post in six months, but some things just grab your attention and really rub you the wrong way. I highlighted the above post, because long thoughtful posts that prove unpopular "opinions" to be correct, are something of a staple of mine. I could have quoted many of batgirl's or your other posts though.

For the intelligent members here that still use these forums, I hope that this new system doesn't influence the mods. It will though. I guess I hope it doesn't influence them too much...

I mostly avoid forums of any kind, but a few weeks ago I set up an account on the forums for the game "Dead by Daylight", because I absolutely love that game. A pretty "toxic" place. Anyway, they have an "up vote" system (no down votes on theirs), which very obviously affects the judgement of their mods. I'm now banned there. It happened like this:

• A fairly long time member made a post that stated that people "should not care" if anybody but themselves is having fun in their game.
• That post received quite a lot of "up votes".
• I quoted that post and labelled the "attitude disgusting". I didn't swear or attack anybody personally.
• A mod removed my post within 30 minutes.
• I saw that and asked why.
• I got sent an official "warning" (I was later told I wasn't going to be warned until I asked why), stating that my post was "name calling".
• Right at that moment I knew I wasn't in any way interested in staying a forum member of such a place, so I argued rationally and without insulting.
• Part of my argument was that I'd made an post earlier in the same thread, flat out calling somebody else an "idiot". That actually was "name calling" and a possible candidate for action of some kind. Of course that post was still up, because it had a lot of up votes.
• Anyway, yeah I just argued right up until the point that they banned me and the whole time I was just thinking how much like chess.com that place was.

That rant wasn't really fully relevant tbh, so sorry about that. My point is that Chess.com has been very badly moderated for as long as I've been here and I only envision this new system increasing it's already countless problems.

I see bug fixes all the time, in addition to new features. 

Mods are typically volunteers. Mods on video game forums are typically teens or young adults... they're not particularly competent or smart (intellectually or emotionally).

Chess.com has some good mods, and they go through enough training that even the so-so mods are consistently in line with the good ones. Chess.com also has very few rules on the forums, so you're very unlikely to run into issues like that here.

I missed a step. My apologies. I was referred to their head moderator and official staff member, almost immediately after the original mod worked out he had no way to argue that I'd "name called", like he had said. Of course, when I argued the same points to the official head staff member, I got shut down even faster with no reasons given at all.

I've had an account banned on chess.com for no reason at all. They even lied to me about the reason. I was so baffled at the time that I naively asked "is this for cheating, or something?", to be told yes. Looking back, it was because my account name and picture had a celebrity in them. In no way was I pretending to be that person, which will have apparent to everybody. I wasn't a forum troll in any way. They literally just banned me for no reason and lied when I enquired about it. OK, so this was probably 10 years ago now. Perhaps it's better now, but it certainly hasn't always been that way in my experience. I have had other issues too, this is just the biggest one that springs to mind.

10 years ago there was some unhappiness with Kohai as I recall. That's quite a long time ago. She's retired from the forums.

I've had some mutes / bans over the years. When I've asked for details, frankly, sometimes staff is clueless about the circumstances (sometimes not), but they've always promptly replied to my emails and been friendly to me, and in resolving my issues, if anything, I've been given more leeway than I deserved.

Anyway, like I said, there are very few rules here that will get you muted or banned, and they're good with giving warnings and stuff. You're not going to be muted for disliking or disagreeing with someone, even if that person is a moderator or staff member.

What issues should they be working on? The site is running fine for me. But anyways, they have different teams/people working on different things... not?

It's a conspiracy. The system is rigged.

I see very few. 

The new features are mostly garbage, just like these upvotes and flares.

I know ur a mod but even u can't make a good case for the direction the owners are taking the site in.

I couldn't agree more.

To be fair Martin has always been a good guy, and genuinely tries to help.  If he has a "fault"(for lack of a better word) its that he simply parrots the company line. 

Martin is a fine gentleman and an ever-helpful moderator.  I don't think he's so much parroting as explaining things to the best of his knowledge (though often from the company's POV). 
The problem is with the decision makers, not with those on the front lines. 

Reddit is among the best of the Internet?

Maybe originally it worked like that. But now is just a collection of "echo chambers" and "mutual admiration societies". Those two phrases are among the polite ways of describing Reddit.

In fairness to Reddit it does have some redeeming features:

1. Sort by controversial. Although the details are secret it is close to sorting by sum of absolute value of votes, not by net value of votes.
2. It is relatively easy to create new subreddits without the involvement of management and moderators of existing subreddits.
3. They support and somewhat encourage creating throwaway accounts just to post things that may be controversial, whereas here having multiple accounts is against terms of service.

The other thing about Reddit is that with their long history and large user base the limitations of their platform are somewhat widely known. Even the very conformist marketing people are aware of them and at least some of them try not to play for the loudest echo chamber.

Edit: It is also worth mentioning one thing bad about Reddit that chess.com did right: moderators are capable and allowed to edit out offending portions of the user's post without having to delete entire post. Surreptitious edits of user's comments done by CEO of Reddit (and other highly positioned individuals) is a well know problem with their platform.

I'm sorry, but such a comment self-identifies you as either lacking introspection or simply as a paid promoter. It has no relation to effective communication whatsoever. It does however relate to propaganda. One-dimensional karma or similar re-inventions are amongst the recognized problems with superficiality and shallowness of networked discussion systems.

Same thing can be said about the designers of this forum voting feature. "Sort by relevance" is a wishful thinking when what is implemented is just "sort by popularity".

I certainly do not agree with everything that gets done but on the balance, I think the site keeps improving.