Forums

At the moment, Ideas seem to be optioned as "Question" or "Statement". There is a broader breakdown I suggest might be useful - "Thoughtful" or "Traffic Generating".

As an example [ completely random, of course ], I chose the BigThink forum to reveal publicly, for the first-time, my ORIGINAL thoughts on the-origin-of-the-universe. About ten years of thought were behind this. By contrast, some deep-thinker recently posted, "God" with the full details - "Does he exist?". This contribution must have taken all of ten-seconds, including thinking AND typing. No prizes for guessing which of these threads generated the most traffic.

My point is that there needs to be a deeper rating - something involving quality, effort, originality, rather than just ability to grab headline attention.

An observation - most of the thoughtful-stuff is now appearing in Comments. Those who just want to be noticed, usually choose to add Responses. This tends to skew the landscape a little.

I applaud the efforts of the BigThink-team so far in trying to categorize and rate ideas. It cannot be an easy task. I am not suggesting I know the answers to improving this system; just adding thoughts that may help.