Reply #226: This thread shows how to reclaim DU first, then reclaim the Party

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This is a good example of a thread that overcame the "Unrec" problem I see at DU, increasingly used to prevent threads ever reaching the Greatest and its wider audience, threads that previously might have received 5-20 recs and spent some time on the greatest-sorted-by-time list before dropping off the first page. BTW this thread had about 70 unrecs when I last checked.

Most times, all it takes to keep a page off the Greatest is to have a couple of replies that misrepresent the OP, dismiss them some way, or otherwise hijack the thread. If the thread is somehow seen and starts getting recs, then the unrecs return. If an LBN thread can be kept from the greatest page and since any post to LBN of a similar article are treated as dupes and merged with the earlier one which few might have seen and is soon too old to rec.

There are a couple of clear examples of this currently on the Top Tens. One started by babylonsister in GD about the NYT article of soldiers becoming teachers now has 171 replies and 53% unrecs vs 47% recs. I earlier noticed it had been at +3 for a while, so I made it +4. I don't know if it ever reached +5 because when I check in a few minutes it was already <0 implying that it had received at least five unrecs in the middle of the night! One or two, maybe; but five seems suspect.

What is going on here at our beloved DU? Did some feed trigger an alert? But why that thread? Why all the unrecs for that topic? I can see why some of the topics might get unrecs, I have no clue why my example and several others get unrecs.

Until they find a way to tweak the current system at DU, I plan to look through all posts in Latest made since I last looked and not just those at the top of the first page. I usually have not done many recs, but that is changing. If enough of us start doing this, I suspect that we will see a change of topics and in tone at DU.

Let's see what happens when more of us start "voting", this time using Recs at DU.