'About Mush Pot' by 'mushpot'

About Mush Pot

Welcome! Glad you could make it.

Mush Pot is dirt-simple: you can submit and vote on content, and the most popular content appears on your front page. If you've used other voting/"social news" websites, then you know the concept, but there are lots of differences between them and Mush Pot.

This site is still very much a work in progress, and I'm interested in your opinions/bug reports/etc. If you have something to say, please respond to this item and I'll see it.

Items

Content on Mush Pot is organized into "items". You typically create items as replies to other items (see the "<reply>" link under every item), although it's also possible to post an item directly (there is a "<post>" link on the front page). If it's popular enough, any item--even if it's a reply to another item--can appear on your front page. The markup available for formatting item content it described here.

Under every item, there are links to the parent item (if it exists and isn't already displayed), a permalink for that item, and a link to an Atom feed of responses to that item.

Voting

You can indicate that you like an item by clicking the arrow button next to it, which casts a vote. (The item you're reading now is special and doesn't have a vote button, but most other items do.) Voting on Mush Pot is less democratic and more meritocratic than other sites, and I'd say that's a good thing. Rather than allowing each user to cast one vote on as many items as they like (a system that is easy to game by creating multiple accounts), votes on Mush Pot are like currency. You have a certain number of votes in your account (the top right of the page shows how many), and by casting a vote, you effectively transfer one vote from your account into the account of the submitter of the item on which you are voting. Naturally, you can only vote when you have votes.

There's a big benefit to this system: multiple votes. If you really like something and you have the votes, you can vote twice, five times, or even a hundred times on an item. There are no restrictions on how you cast your votes; you can even cast them on your own items.

Negative ("no likey") Items

If you disapprove of an item, you can express your feelings by clicking the "<no likey>" link and explaining what you don't like. This creates a special, negative item that counts against the parent item. Every vote cast on the negative item, in addition to adding a vote to your account, subtracts one vote from the account of the user who submitted the item you disapproved of ("re-tag" negative items are an exception to this). But be judicious when creating negative items: they too can be marked with a negative item! The purpose of this system is to make bad actors vulnerable to losing the votes in their account.

Tags

When an item is created, the submitter can select tags to associate with it. Using the "<manage tags>" link at the top of the page, you can select the tags you are most interested in, and items carrying those tags will be selected preferentially for the front page. If you are not logged in, the front page just shows items that are generally popular.

More

There are many features not discussed here. To read about them, see all the items submitted by me, the "mushpot" user. Or better yet, subscribe to my feed.

mushpot a year ago