Temporary Appraisal Invisibility

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sylin

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To begin, I take no credit in coming up with this idea, Choo and Doge are part and parcel to coming up with this solution although the problem itself is clearly evident.

The problem is the conformity within the Appraisal section, what Choo dubbed as the "snowball effect", where the first appraisal sets a standard that other users mirror only with slight differences. This mirroring is to avoid looking foolish (ironically) as you are blending into what appears to be the consensus. Now, there is no concrete, experimental proof of this, but conformity is a universal and basic phenomenon that numerous psychology experiments explore and explain.

As opinions are opinions, however inaccurate of an account's actual $-potential, it is fine for the first appraisal to be awry--that is their opinion. However, that should not guide the next person's appraisal. Often after a first appraisal has been made, it becomes much easier for unknowledgeable or "newer" members to follow suit worry-free. It becomes a matter of hardly conscious post-farming, changing a 30 for a 35, a 210 to a 200. You might argue that it doesn't matter, that new members' appraisals can just be disregarded--but when you have this mob mentality, quantity resembles actuality (i.e. to a brand new member if a bunch of 200-posts 2019 members all give similar appraisals, it looks like the truth). I highly recommend reading both of these [Doge] [Choo], which give specific appraisal thread examples.

What is needed is a blind system, where all appraisals of an account are only visible to the OP for say 48 hours [Doge]. This would deter unhelpful post-farming appraisals as everyone would have to be confident in their appraisal to actually give it. This blindness is temporary for two reasons. One, it would be useful for other members to eventually see unbiased and hopefully knowledgeable appraisals of an account, understanding the current market. Two, it deters looking foolish if you're unknowledgeable and therefore unconfident.
 
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Completely agree with this. I feel like this "snowball effect" happens often and it's not a good way for a seller to determine the value of an account.
 
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Tommy W

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Completely agree. Would be pretty useful, I've seen it happen tons of times.
 

Rhos

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Imo part of it is that people respect the opinions of certain prolific appraisers. And it's fine, generally people know what they're talking about, but if someone makes a mistake it's difficult to fix it.

What I'm most concerned about is somebody using that effect maliciously. It would be very easy to create an alt account (or partner with someone), then appraise accounts for far more than they're worth so that they could be sold for a profit.
 

Landon

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Or just don't count messages in Appraisals towards total message count. Some users on here have over 3,000 messages in there, alone.
 

sylin

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Or just don't count messages in Appraisals towards total message count. Some users on here have over 3,000 messages in there, alone.
Imo that's too drastic of a change. People usually like/request multiple appraisals and if there becomes little incentive to give appraisals, that may be more bad than good. It's more so that the appraisals shouldn't all be similar or consolidated solely because someone posted first.
 
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sylin

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If people post with the intent to post farm, it may just weed out the amount of repeated or similar appraisals. Note the may as I cannot make the determination that it will.

Regardless, this forum may have a lot of people who only give when they get something in return, not everyone is lile that.

There may be people who genuinely post there to post appraisals and their post count do not matter.

In my opinion since this is a marketplace, your post count should not matter. It is not like if posts in the appraisals were to not count toward post count that you wouldn't be able to see how many posts you have in that section. There is still the "Post Areas" on profiles which shows how many posts you have in each section, regardless if it goes toward your post count messages.
Should sections such as the introduction also not count towards your post number? I'm not entirely opposed to what you're suggesting, I just see what I proposed as a better or more predictable alternative.
 

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Jayleaf

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Maybe make it less of a posting section than it is. Have a tab on the top that says "Appraisals" and you submit a request there. (Kinda works like how you would fill out a scam report, prefilled questions n stuff) You would then click a button somewhere that says "View Appraisal Requests" and you could respond to each individual one, they do count for messages, but there could be a time limit of maybe 1 per 15mins or 1 per 10 mins
 

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Maybe make it less of a posting section than it is. Have a tab on the top that says "Appraisals" and you submit a request there. (Kinda works like how you would fill out a scam report, prefilled questions n stuff) You would then click a button somewhere that says "View Appraisal Requests" and you could respond to each individual one, they do count for messages, but there could be a time limit of maybe 1 per 15mins or 1 per 10 mins
That would discourage anyone from wanting to appraise multiple accounts at a time, though. I agree something should be done to lessen the impact of appraisals on post value (although I don't think they should ever be 0, because there any many high-quality posts in the section that have taken extensive experience, research, time, etc to put together), though. Perhaps weigh the post value based on length? I suppose it could be bypassed (e.g "200" v.s "I would like to believe this account is worth roughly $200 USD, although if anyone agrees or disagrees with me, they are free to react and post their opinions below for me to respond to :)"), but it would at least be a start. Regardless, this suggestion is about the temporary invisibility of appraisals to prevent parroting, so I'd suggest we move this to a different suggestion if you genuinely care about this being changed.
 

Jayleaf

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That would discourage anyone from wanting to appraise multiple accounts at a time, though. I agree something should be done to lessen the impact of appraisals on post value (although I don't think they should ever be 0, because there any many high-quality posts in the section that have taken extensive experience, research, time, etc to put together), though. Perhaps weigh the post value based on length? I suppose it could be bypassed (e.g "200" v.s "I would like to believe this account is worth roughly $200 USD, although if anyone agrees or disagrees with me, they are free to react and post their opinions below for me to respond to :)"), but it would at least be a start. Regardless, this suggestion is about the temporary invisibility of appraisals to prevent parroting, so I'd suggest we move this to a different suggestion if you genuinely care about this being changed.

^^people wouldnt see the appraisals posted. Only the OP can see.
 

Sloth

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This would definitely push users to give accurate appraisals based on their own personal opinion. However it wouldn’t stop dedicated post farmers who are still going to reply to every appraisal thread regardless of what other users are posting.
 

Mick

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At the moment we aren't planning to do any more development for our site until we can migrate to XF2 since we'll have to rewrite everything then. Perhaps once we move to XF2 and have fixed all the bugs that come with that and have more time for some new development. I also don't really want to work on developing new tools which will basically only help Minecraft account sales on our platform since that isn't the direction I'm wanting to take the site.

Denied, thank you for the suggestion.
 
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