Unofficially Mixxed Code of Honor.
For many of us Mixx has been a breath of fresh air, but over time a few, less than desirable, scents have made their way across many noses. These scents come in the form of blind voting, inappropriate submissions, disrespectful behavior, increased number of duplicate stories, or just plain ignorance on the part of new Mixxers and Old. A simple mistake by one person usually doesn’t do much to harm the system, but multiply a few innocent mistakes by a few tens of thousands and you’ve got yourself more than a few problems. In the Mixxing Bowl as well as Mixx itself many people want to know what the “appropriate” behavior at Mixx is, but there’s one problem. There are not hard and fast rules to being a good Mixxer, more like a lot of subtle guidelines. I decided to come up with a proposed, albeit draft, Code of Honor for those who are members of the Mixxing Bowl to follow to help insure that Mixx stays a fun, nice, and informative place.
Code of Honor (Unofficial)
- Respect others, their opinion, and their right to free speech. If you see disrespectful behavior, report it. Do not engage those being disrespectful, trolling, or otherwise mean. Engaging them does not help the situation and can inflame it further.
- Before submitting a story, ask yourself if your story could have been submitted already. Generally speaking, if it’s a big breaking story that’s at least a half hour old, it’s already been submitted. Do yourself and the community a favor and search first.
- Keep your headlines and descriptions accurate and free of sensationalist language. Be aware of the headline and description the Mixx submission uses as it could be wrong, off topic, or blank.
- Mixx empowers users to find their “blend of the web”. You can help that blend by submitting from a variety of sources. Much like people grow tiresome of eating the same meal every day, seeing someone submit from the same URL every day is tiresome. Mixx it up and use your own content/blog as a seasoning to your content recipe.
- Although full internationalization is important to the community (that means lots of people from lots of countries), please keep all submissions in English until a system is in place to properly sort out multiple languages.
- Keep Mixx and the community happy by tagging for accuracy rather than readership. While the system supports multiple word tags, please keep the number of words to a minimum.
- Be aware of the content you vote up. Voting up or down, blind voting, in order to increase your karma points does not help you, it only hurts Mixx in the end. Do not equate a friend with an automatic vote. They are human and can make a mistake, and you could be also making a mistake by voting up inappropriate content.
- If you are going to vote down a submission please be courteous to the submitter and let them know why you voted their submission down. If you leave a comment, please be courteous and respectful when engaging another user.
- Do not counter a down vote by another user with down voting some or all of their submissions. If they were courteous enough to leave a comment as to why they down voted it, please respect their decision. If they are down voting your submissions inappropriately, report them. It is best you not engage them or retaliate.
- Keep Mixx relevant and on topic by submitting as close to the original source as possible. Submitting content from sites that knowingly copy from another source with no additional original content or analysis is not appropriate and could be considered stealing. You wouldn’t want someone stealing from your site. Would you?
- Keep Mixx honest by not using Mixx Mail, Groups, or Shares to solicit votes. As a good rule of thumb, if its a very important story and everyone should read, then share it, otherwise don’t. If you know that a small number of individuals will like the story, share with them instead of a group of many.
- Share sparingly. While it’s cool you want to share things with your friends, understand its possible they have several dozen more who are doing the same thing. Its more likely the story will be ignored.
- Keep comments on topic and of value. Please don’t use comments to post links to sites affiliated with you. Don’t post asinine or off-topic comments in order to gain a few karma points, although humor is very welcome. Comments are to provide a discussion about the story submitted.
- Keep the scope of a story relevant by posting in the proper category(ies). Posting in non-related or all (category bombing) categories does not help readership or number of votes a submission will receive.
- Show respect for topic specific groups. Do not post blindly (group bombing) into every group to gain readership or votes. Group admins are well within their rights if they deem that you behave impropertly.
Any feedback is welcome as this was a first attempt to cover most of the bases in Mixx etiquette.
Great article, Brian. I agree with everything. Everything but #3. In general, I agree, but sometimes, the titles I give my submissions are less descriptive than they could be, because I like a snappy or humorous headline.
But, you know me. I’m not trying to get votes or mass attention, so it doesn’t seem as important to me. In the interest of following the entire code (if adopted), I’ll roll with it…
But only grudgingly.
@honest_ape.
Well #3 I was aiming more towards keeping rumors stated as possible fact. Or someone taking the substance of an article and drawing a completely different conclusion and writing that conclusion as a headline. For instance and article about homeland security increasing their budget, but the person writes a headline “Dept of Homeland Security says Attacks are emminent”.
Hey, thanks for finally writing this. I was hoping the mixx crew would come out with it, but I guess they’re pretty busy with all the new features, you know what I mean?
I hope this will help all the users, new and old, get more acquainted with the appropriate way to act. We spend a lot of time thinking about what jerks people are, but it’s possible they just don’t realize what they’re doing.
On #11 I think there should be more emphasis on not using Mixx Mail to gain votes, but that Share should be used for those stories you feel have that something special and need to be brought to the attention of all your contacts. Groups are only for stories that fit that specific group. Use Mixx mail for discussions or questions you have for one or many.
I try to share no more than one story per week, but will block anyone who uses the mail feature for this. Am I wrong for that line of thinking?
Great CoH Brian! I especially agree with limiting the sharing and commenting on down votes…
@mark
When I first thought of the mixx PM system (I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to think of it, but, to my knowledge I was the first person to write a post about it at the MB) I thought it would just be a message between two people. I was really disheartened to find that it could be between anyone, but it hasn’t turned out so bad. I’ve given people warnings, and I’ll block those who don’t follow it. What more can you do?
Excellent post! What a shame it is that a legitimate need exists for #9 to be included in the list.
Great article
This is so good Mixx should make it part of their TOS. Really people, not following this code of honor will turn Mixx into another Digg in no time, and I doubt anyone wants to see that happen. We have a chance on Mixx. Let’s not ruin it!