STALAG 266: The Dark Side Of MoveOn.Org

This is part one of three articles on MoveOn. It is written with the sincere hope MoveOn will rethink its dysfunctional ActionForum.

I once has immense respect for MoveOn. It seemed to have its act together in the battles it chose to fight. MoveOn house meetings embraced and encouraged a spirit of equality and open expression. Which is why their on-line forum seems so shockingly out of character. Compared to other on-line political forums, its operation is so restrictive it deserves the designation of Stalag 266.

MoveOn is only as effective as the quality and implementation of their ideas. To that end the ORIGINAL idea behind these Action Forums is intriguing. Here is a 2001 proposal for an e-democracy policy development forum by the current Webmaster of ActionForum.

On http://www.moveon.org/about/ MoveOn claims:

How does MY voice count?
At MoveOn, every member has a voice in choosing our shared direction. Using our ActionForum software, you can propose issue priorities and strategies. Others will see and respond to your suggestions, and the most strongly supported ideas will rise to the top. We adopt the issues that rise to the top as our campaign priorities. In 2000, for example, our members chose campaign finance reform and protection of the environment as our two top issues. In 2003, Iraq and media reform rose to the top. We'll also continue take the initiative to organize quick action on other timely issues as they arise.

What a crock! The Webmaster has admitted that a post with as little as 10 votes can rate higher than a post with 10,000 votes.

Yet I can see this model producing meaningful results under given certain conditions. One example was a short-lived forum from January 2005. Members were asked: "What is the most important question for us to ask each of the DNC Chair candidates and report back to the MoveOn membership?"


But now instead of providing an e-democracy forum to develop and vote on ideas, MoveOn continues to sabotage their own model. In the process they've sabotaged the hope of quality input from its membership. It amounts to a self-inflicted lobotomy. The MoveOn forum is now a suffocating straightjacket that violates the very principles they once claimed were their strength. Yet ActionForum STILL BOASTS about those features it REFUSES TO ENABLE! Check these pages:
http://www.actionforum.com

/afstrengths.html
/how_does_it_work.html

/uniquefeatures.html

We see statements such as:

"ActionForums are structured to promote a productive dialogue by the rise of ideas with broad support. They make clear where agreement and disagreement lie. ActionForums support threads of comments and replies to comments ordered by the preference of the participants rather than chronologically. ActionForums are fair and non-partisan because they operate according to a content neutral set of rules, which are applied automatically

We’re told ActionForum: “Encourages Dialogue”, “Builds Communities”, “Enables Collaboration”, “Identifies Areas of Consensus”, Generates Reporting that gives the information you need to take an Action.

Really?

Until August 2005, MoveOn has had other several issue-specific forums on various topics, one to find a t-shirt slogan. Yet MoveOn REFUSES to offer forums on VITAL TOPICS like protecting the federal judiciary, reframing the Progressive message, election 2006, impeachment, developing a long-term vision, taming corporations, constitutional reform, free trade, etc.

MoveOn now only promotes but ONE forum... its National Great Goals forum. This last one started back in mid-November 2004. Predictably it's become a dumping for every topic a MoveOn member can think of... most have NOTHING do with goals. Even the most highly rated posts rarely have anything to do with goals. The forum now has over 40,000 posts.... most of them have just a handful of ratings.

MOVEON SABOTAGED ITS OWN RATING SYSTEM:

The rating system was to let the best ideas rise to the top… and permit the members to “police” the forum since the good would drive down the bad. Yet what rises to the top are often bland, feel-good, statements that with nothing specific to object to and certainly can’t not provide MoveOn with any useful input. Since there are no useful guidelines to provide a common rating standard anything can rise to the top. Here’s one that was the #1 post on March 1st in MoveOn Land:

Re: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You - You forgot AIPAC
Liberty Pilgrim, you forgot to mention the most dangerous one of all, the one riding the multi-headed beast – AIPAC.
- Dan XXXX, Marketing (March 01, 2006; Canton, MI)

It wasn't even a "goal". It's a note to someone. It just briefly beat the odds in MoveOn's dysfunctional rating system. It was vague, and happened to be posted when 10 members were on-line to read/rate “important” it before it slipped into MoveOn oblivion.

The rating system has two components. The first is a simple agree/disagree choice. The second rates ideas on an importance scale of 1-5. A unanimous 10 “most important” votes is the magic number to get a post to the top-rated list. On November 14, 2005, the WebMaster explained it this way:

“Recent comment are just ordered by time. Last posted is top of the list. When (and if) a comment gets over ten importance ratings it will also show up in the top comments. So the a comment with over 10 importance ratings will then be in two places--the chronological list in recent comments, and in the top comments ordered by the average importance ratings.”

Since 10 is such a low number, votes can easily be skewed by right-wing trolls… or mods trying to kill any criticism of the forum. MoveOn claims

“This insures that when a comment is inserted it is relatively close to where most people think it should be.”

The Webmaster continued:

“Since it is an average that is used (total number of stars divided by number of people rating) the number of ratings isn't that important.”

The number of votes ISN’T IMPORTANT? Talk about an arbitrary rating system. It can give a post with the approval of a mere ten members a HIGHER rating than a post with the approval of 10,000 members but with 1000 giving it lower importance ratings. How can this EVER “make clear where agreement and disagreement lie.” as MoveOn claims? It can’t. The rating system provides only the ILLUSION of agreement.

The forum has another built-in bias. When one enters the forum, one first sees the top-rated list not the main forum. This gives the top-list posts an automatic advantage since they have more exposure and thus given more ratings. Some older posts may be read/rated THOUSANDS of times while the vast majority of posts are ignored, get a handful of ratings, then slip into MoveOn Oblivion. For example one post from December 19, 2005 was rated 4888 times on March 1, while the average number of votes for ALL OTHER POSTS written that day (minus one other that obviously also benefited from this bias) was less than NINE! In this example that's a 543x advantage. Was that post 543X better than those other ideas?

So what do the ratings mean if the vast majority of those posts are never rated by even the majority of the members? Scrolling though the top 500 rated posts one (#199155) had 20199 votes proving that there are were once at least that many unique active forum accounts. It comes as no surprise this post was made on the FIRST DAY the Great Goals forum opened… November 17, 2004. Given this membership, the average post from that sample date of December 19th 2005 was rated by a miniscule 0.00045% of those MoveOn members.

Because the ratings compare apples to aardvarks, there’s no logic to the results. Rather than restructure the forum to insure the integrity of the rating system, here’s MoveOn’s “solution”. The Webmaster wrote me last summer saying:

“Every comment is read at least twice. The forum is checked many times each day and some comments usually forwarded to the team each day. Two summaries are done each week for those comments that reflect more long term goals.”

But if the ActionForum had multiple forums… one of which specialized in long term goals, such time-consuming note-taking would not be required. There would be no questions whether the data were being filtered. ANYONE from MoveOn could just go to see what the top rated ideas were in each forum.

There is another more subtle bias. The very nature of the forum’s operation is so polarizing that many who believe in e-democracy or are used to wealth of features in traditional forums have just left in disgust or have been banned for instigating revolts. It is a legitimate question to ask if those who remain or even thrive in this dysfunctional environment provide a representative a cross section of the MoveOn membership? More on this in articles 2 and 3.

USER-UNFRIENDLY IN THE EXTREME

As a MoveOn member I found posting there to be an exercise in pure frustration. I'd post what I believed were common sense suggestions only to get some disapproval votes. I call in anonymous drive-by voting. I'd never know why anyone voted since direct responses to posts are prohibited in Stalag 266. With no reply function and no personal messaging system, the ONLY official option for members to communicate with each other is to further clog up the forum with off-topic notes addressed to others which may never be found, and are sure to soon be buried.

In a few old closed forums that have not yet been deleted the reply function is still active. Instead of being able to open a post and see an entire thread... one must peel back layer after layer to read all the replies. If that wasn’t bad enough, longer posts are themselves broken up into two pages. It is, by far, the worst forum software I’ve ever seen.

Posts are displayed in the forum but also each has their own URL. But one can only rate or withdraw posts in the forum itself... not on the post page. There’s no way to save a link to a post in the forum since they are forever driven down by new posts. It's impossible for someone to post a link to an old post to get votes. If one believes in an idea, they often repost their ideas over and over hoping to get traction. There's also no search function either for keywords or user posts... features most forums take for granted.

The webmaster reports the reply function has been disabled since February 2004 when there were problems with trolls. He's tried to tap dance around this issue by claiming the forum supports "dialog" not "discussion" when in reality the issue is merely the reply feature. Why MoveOn never recruited real mods as other forums have is beyond comprehension.

The forum database software treats each post separately. In those old forums were the reply function was enabled, threads fall apart once the forum is deleted. If one looks at the screenshot on the Unique Features page we see this post and some responses. That “discussion” is now gone. All that are left are posts scattered in the database.

Another problem many complain about is there are too many posts to be effectively rated. There were about 120 posts just for March 1st and 150 for March 2. The logical “fix” would be to create numerous issue-specific forums to spread the load out. Members could read/rate issues they were most interested in. Instead MoveOn has further reduced posting from 5 to 3 a day.

It seems MoveOn's ONLY approach in addressing any problem at the forum is to further sabotage its usefulness. If this is a resources issue, MoveOn better get its priorities straight and stop trying to run a forum for an organization of 3.3 MILLION on the cheap.

WHERE’S THE ACTION IN ACTIONFORUM?

The ActionForum is also misnamed. The forum is currently geared for creating GOALS. NO FORUMS are provided for proposing ACTION PLANS. My belief is these forums could become an invaluable resource IF the site were more dynamic as once promised on http://www.moveon.org/about/. For MoveOn to get effective and timely guidance from the membership, issue specific forums should be created at a moment's notice to allow the membership to brainstorm to fully exploit political opportunities.

Curiously the webmaster thinks this dysfunctional mess is preferable to permitting discussion in traditional threads in issue specific forums. He recently stated

“There are many forums out there. There is probably not one structure that will fit everyone.”

Yet this is the ONLY forum MoveOn provides its members. Members have no alternative but to fight to improve it.

The forum SHOULD be an absolute embarrassment to MoveOn which claims it represents "Democracy In Action". By refusing to either fix ActionForum or discontinue this farce, MoveOn has obviously given up on this forum producing any meaningful input. It also reveals much about how the leadership views the membership.

When I get cynical I tend to believe the MoveOn leadership likes it this way since if there are no specific action plans ever developed and recommended by the membership, the leadership can never be held accountable if they ignore those recommendations.

After some 9 months of agitating there with no results it's safe to say nothing will change. Yet MoveOn is too valuable not to fight to protect... even when its leadership is out to lunch. Please consider the above arguments and try to educate fellow MoveOn members at the forum. Equally important write MoveOn direct here

Feel free to post a link to these blog articles in whatever liberal-left political forums you visit:
http://reinventing-america.blogspot.com

(revised 3-25)

ulTRAX