I didn’t take “primitive” as being a dis. I think he meant it as this site has a very basic architecture for hosting our format. Sometimes the simplest way is the best.
I agree with your interpretation of “primitive” in the article. I also agree with your assessment of freerepublic’s architecture.
A noob recently started a thread suggesting that freepers be able to rate the posts of other freepers. Poor guy. He took it like a man.
I agree with his suggestion, though.
As Kristinn explained on the O’Reilly Factor, freerepublic doesn’t have the budget to moderate freepers like they may want to. A rating system might work to freerepublic’s advantage. Most freepers are governed by a sense of honor that would self replicate in a voluntary ranking system. On the DailyKos, it might have the opposite effect, the more outrageous and vitriolic, the higher your ranking.
Ranking criteria might consist of voting whether a freepers post is thoughtful, sarcastic, sophomoric, humorous, etc and then freepers could eliminate posts irrelevant to their criteria. That way, freepers could eliminate posts like this by setting their preference to eliminate ‘thoughtful’ posts. (c;
As freepers become more and more vitriolic toward certain candidates and their supporters, the negativity discourages discussion and that can’t help freerepublic as a forum to espouse Jim Robinson’s brand of conservatism.
I didn’t take “primitive” as being a dis. I think he meant it as this site has a very basic architecture for hosting our format.
I think you may be right. Different forum software has different features that appeal to diverse people. I lurked here for some time before signing up, so had a general idea about how it's set up, but the format is definitely different from any other I've seen. Not saying that's good or bad, just thinking of the old seventies tune, "different strokes for different folks". :)
Sincerely,
d