Nectarine

Parallax is a great tune, but it's also a good example of how even though a tune may be technically awesome and demoscene-related, it may not be good for play on the stream, or at least not without some restrictions. It is too long and it bothers too many people. Those who truly love it can listen to it in all its 12 minute glory on their own time, rather than inflicting it on everyone else who doesn't like it. Similar reasoning holds for 8088 MPH (Demo), which is from an amazing demo, but virtually unlistenable by itself. Those interested in that tune should watch the demo (which is very cool), rather than put it on the stream. Tunes like these just aren't really fun communal listening experiences.

Generally speaking, long tunes have a higher standard of streamability. Something like Parallax would probably not be an issue if it were 3 minutes long or even 5 minutes long, but at over 11 minutes long, it's just too much to sit through for those not seriously into it. Plus, when lined up with other very long tunes, it can make for a really miserable session. Perhaps the request system needs to be revamped to prevent too many long tunes from being queued in succession. Until we arrive at a good solution for that, though, I think Parallax should remain locked. NOT banned, NOT deleted...it just means it's not streamable for now.

Keeping a shorter version of these tunes might be an option, if it's made clear (e.g. add "[Excerpt]" to the title).

Locking tunes like these is, in my opinion, too drastic a measure. Longer lock times for long tunes and/or lowly ranked tunes is a proper way to handle this, I think.

What's the prob with 8088 MPH (Demo) ? Doesn't seem to be hated that much. Shortening tunes violates artist's vision, rather delete whole song then if need be, IMO. And yes, it's from a demo, it belongs here.

Personally i wouldn't do anything though, as nothing *really* bothers me what's playing, not even 10+ minutes boring techno (or something like that, wipeout-kinda-stuff) tunes. But i'm not everyone so just saying my opinion here

So if something really needs to be done, then i'm with Mystra on this one. Or some other measure within the same lines.

We tried the long lock times based on rating (not sure about length) and I don't feel like it worked well. Rating is sometimes not a very good predictor of how people actually feel about a song and how suitable it is for the stream. 8088MPH is actually a good example; it's rated fairly well because it is an amazing technical achievement and for 8088 at that, but it is 8 min of horrendous bleeping cacophony (and I say this as a fan of VCS music lol). Another example is a 30-minute chiptune with marginal scene relevance...it was not terrible in terms of composition, and many would be inclined to rate it about 3 stars maybe, but, um, no. And I would not vote 1* on it either because that's saying it's really awful, like, I dunno, Kein Vergleich.

For long tunes, I think we should do something like Arrakis suggested in another thread -- prevent too many from being queued together, or maybe limit the number of long tunes a user could request in a period of time (day, week, month?).

Another possibility would be to add some other kind of vote related to streamability. I don't like voting 1* on a tune like Parallax just because I don't think it should be on the stream. The 1* vote implies that the voter thinks it's crap. Maybe we could allow people to make a sort of report that says "I really hate this tune and never want to hear it on the stream". We could put an absolute limit on these, such as allowing 3 reports per user at any given time (if you already have 3 and you make a new one, you must withdraw an old one), and temporarily lock tunes based on how many users have complained.

I'm not one to speak up often. Actually, almost never.

I recall seeing the kerfuffle that provoked this post though. Some person chained up several SID queues of hefty length creating a solid block of the stuff. Just an epic length Odyssey of droning c64 tunes that took an awful long time to get to the point. Granted I can find a droning groovy if taken in measure, but if you are going to take Nectarine all aboard the long droning SID train for a half hour you better make sure all passengers are down for your destination. Especially when other people want to queue stuff.

If this is a rare occurance (I listen a lot and I don't recall dealing with this an awful lot) then putting effort (like code and rules) into blocking this behavior is going to be awful low yield cost/benefit. Not wort the effort. Then again I'm of the mind of if you try to make a lot of code and stuff to block annoying behavior, then people are going to find whole new fun and exciting ways to annoy you.

If you do want to do something about this, something that limits the ability to chain long tunes together, like if the net sum of everything you got queued and playing is beyond 10 minutes you need to take a breather pal, unless you're part of the moderator club or something. I dunno.

I generally agree with you that social solutions (asking people to stop doing something annoying) are better than technical ones. But several people have been complaining about the issue lately so it may be time to look at some sort of compromise solution on the technical level, allowing these tunes to be played, but not allowing them to clog up the queue. Preventing chains of long tunes from being queued is pretty easy to do, and maybe we don't need to generalise that into a "you may queue X minutes of tunes each hour" thing like we had long ago.

I like that solution over trying to target songs on an individual level. Otherwise people will start arguing why did you block X when Y is similar, and then someone will argue the nuances between the two while a third party cries bias. Meanwhile some joker is saying that stuff should all be trashed while the Chief is all like "Now if you people don't pipe down right this instant I'm going to pull this car over and nobody will be happy."

As much as I complain about some of the low rated tunes, the only real problem is when they get all get queued together repeatedly.
If you're queueing three 1 star tunes in a row, you're not listening to the stream, you're looking for reactions.
Maybe limiting low rated song queueing to once an hour/3 hours per user would fix this.

As an interim solution, now a user can't request a long tune (> 7 min) if they already have such a tune in the queue.

th4t1guy: as for crapfests, well, they're sort of a part of site culture. We used to block low-rated tunes depending on the average rating of the queue, but there are plenty of songs that have low ratings yet still deserve to be heard. I think it's quite interesting when people are able to dig these up. OTOH we randomly get hit with Glass Lizard and Tina.

What do you guys think of the "I hate this tune button" idea? At least that way, regulars can vote hated tunes off the island, so to speak. There's no way to please everyone, but this would sort of create a compromise by filtering out certain 1* tunes that regular users really don't want to ever hear again.

A lot of Reddit communities have a rule where downvotes are to be used for posts that are bad in some way (e.g. spam) and not merely posts you disagree with. In practice getting people to follow such rules seems to be very difficult.

I am very happy to see that we are trying to fix the problem with crap-queues :-)

mirrorbird: With all due respect, reddit is in no way analogous to Nectarine. Maybe if we have 20,000 users logging in daily, we would be worried about votes being used 'improperly'

The idea with the "I hate this tune" button is more along the lines of "if you could ban 5 tunes from the Necta stream, what would they be?" In that way we can relieve some of the aggravation with tunes that are not quite ban-worthy in the objective sense but that most regulars would be happy to never hear again.

I also like the idea of having special time slots like they do on terrestrial radio stations, where we play "top-10 hits this year countdown", "worst tunes of the year", "hyperbase hour", and so on, which IMO would make the lock system less tyrannical. That is something I have been looking into implementing here and there.

My point is that people already don't read anything (constantly asking things that are in the FAQ) so how on earth can we expect them to meaningfully distinguish between giving something one star and giving something a new special "hate" vote?

Well, you can give every song 1 star if you want, but the hate vote would be limited, say only 5 active at once, which can be switched around. The idea is to deactivate tunes that have a certain number of hate votes active. If votes get switched to something else, the tune could become active again.

We all pretty much know each other here, so I really don't feel like abuse of the voting system is a major concern. We don't have a FAQ about voting anyway. The most "F" FAQs seem to be "what happened to the old site" and "how do I queue more than 1 tune at once". The first one is literally question 1 in the FAQ, whereas the other one is somewhat buried in there. Any ideas on making the FAQ more readable/prominent?