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In reply to the discussion: We have changed the way your "Jury Score" is calculated [View all]Android3.14
(5,402 posts)Two things -
One, a malicious person could create a programmed 'bot to post inane pap ("love this post", "I agree", "EOM", etc.) to multiple threads in order to to artificially boost their count, as could an organized group of trolls. As a journalist, observing some of the high-count posters and some of the memetic trends they tend to promote, my BS detector goes off in a serious fashion.
Anyone with long-time experience in marketing and media recognizes you have a problem in this area, specifically.
Second, the posting guidelines are far too strict when it comes to identifying a personal attack.
For example, suppose a poster claims to be...I don't know...a journalist. Yet a responder to the OP, using logic and data, challenges that poster on the validity of the claim, saying the poster is lying about being a journalist, or casting doubt on the poster's motivations. In any other community that thrives on informed rhetoric, it is the responsibility of the poster to defend his or her expertise, or to ignore the challenge to that expertise. At DU, someone slaps the label "personal attack" on the post, and suppresses the informative debate that should follow such a challenge. It is unnecessary and damaging to the purpose of debate for a jury to defend challenges to a poster's credentials, especially when the the juries tend to base their decisions more on the thread count than on the merits of the challenge.
(Now that being said, as a person who runs a website, I recognize that you will run it the way you see fit, and congratulations on having a popular site.)