compuder

Voat had remarkably little promise and followed the standard tragectory of sites designed to clone a site for angry users jumping ship.

Moot, founder of 4chan, had some good comments about the phenomenon during his resignation:

>To single out 420chan, it’s actually one of the imageboards that I have actually respected over the years. I think that what's kind of defined a lot of image boards, even going back to the first kind of spin off from 4chan (which was 5Chan), 7chan and all these others. They tend to spin out based on a decision I make, or they don’t like me, or they don’t like 4chan, or they don’t like 4chan culture or whatever. More or less over the years, most of those sites have kind of fizzled out.

>While 420Chan started similarly to 5chan, (the admin didn’t like me), I really respect that he wanted to have a bunch of topics that 4chan didn’t have ... ["]4chan is never gonna have a drugs board, or a wrestling board, or all these other boards that I want, and so we may as well create a site that caters to that.”

>I really respect the fact that he really took it in its own direction, it doesn't look like 4chan. The other sites ... created a whole era of open source clones of 4chan that offered 4chan in a box and emulated our front page and everything.

>People, for whatever reason wanted to make 4chan that wasn’t 4chan.

Voat is just the latest "reddit that isn't reddit".

>no amount of rules or metrics can turn a bad academic into a good one...

I believe you've mistaken these systems as being for reform purposes, rather than existing as a way to weed out bad actors who want to enjoy the substantial benefits of tenure or a large salary without doing the work which justifies them.

When you reject metrics, the insidious thing is that you lack tools to catch bad actors who, due to oft-present subjectives like better than average lying ability, being liked by their team despite being largely ineffective, and exploitation of people's desire to not create conflict, the organization will never hear about them until long after the damage is done, they've made off like bandits, and you can no longer fix what they've done, since you didn't know when it happened.

Metrics cut through these specific subjectives and are therefore effectively necessary.

You can be a dirty academic, but published paper number metrics mean fakers now need to be, minimum, good enough to fake doing the job of a real academic well enough to publish, which means at least theoretically they could reform. Code reviews, pull requests, and similar programming measures do the same, leaving a clear and auditable point at which failure can be caught and later reversed. They further make it necessary to be good enough at programming to not only survive the interview, but also fake a long-term progression of source code which means to cheat you at least need to know how to program well enough to get away with it, which is within spitting distance of actually coding something useful anyways.

Admittedly, I don't think metrics create good incentives a lot of the time, but if you're thinking about the very long term and want to prevent your company's bottom from solely being a feudally structured nepotism contest, metrics are the only way to do so.