May I suggest that length of comment should factor significantly into the choice to up/downvote?
I once suggested that upvote means “I would take the time to read this again if the insights from it were deleted from my brain” and downvote means “I would like the time it took to read this back.”
Time figures into both of these. If you read a few words and don’t profit from them, well, neither have you lost much. If you read several paragraphs, reread them to ensure you’ve understood them (because the writing was obtuse, say), and in the end conclude that you have learned nothing, the comment has, in some sense, made a real imposition on your time, and deserves a downvote.
This being said, one should not hesitate to downvote a short message if it does not add at all to the discussion, simply to keep the flow of useful comments without superfluous interruption that would hamper what could otherwise be a constructive argument.
It’s about insight density. It’s not as if you can take an insightful comment and write it really short to get a certain upvote. If you have a longer comment, you have room for more insight. If you have a short comment, you can’t be all that insightful.
You can express an insight succinctly, or you can be long-winded. A long comment has space for more insight, but that space is often wasted. Stunk and White’s The Elements of Style makes that point for prose, and Edward Tufte’s The Visual Representation of Quantitative Information makes it for plots. Every element of a piece should do work.
I’d rather follow your first point up as, if you have a short comment because you took the time to purify and condense your thoughts, that’s a good thing.
But, don’t forget the overhead for the comment simply existing in the first place. You rapidly run into diminishing returns for shortening a comment to less than a few lines. Ten words conveying a thought is not effectively twice as dense as twenty words conveying that thought.
May I suggest that length of comment should factor significantly into the choice to up/downvote?
I once suggested that upvote means “I would take the time to read this again if the insights from it were deleted from my brain” and downvote means “I would like the time it took to read this back.”
Time figures into both of these. If you read a few words and don’t profit from them, well, neither have you lost much. If you read several paragraphs, reread them to ensure you’ve understood them (because the writing was obtuse, say), and in the end conclude that you have learned nothing, the comment has, in some sense, made a real imposition on your time, and deserves a downvote.
This being said, one should not hesitate to downvote a short message if it does not add at all to the discussion, simply to keep the flow of useful comments without superfluous interruption that would hamper what could otherwise be a constructive argument.
It’s about insight density. It’s not as if you can take an insightful comment and write it really short to get a certain upvote. If you have a longer comment, you have room for more insight. If you have a short comment, you can’t be all that insightful.
You can express an insight succinctly, or you can be long-winded. A long comment has space for more insight, but that space is often wasted. Stunk and White’s The Elements of Style makes that point for prose, and Edward Tufte’s The Visual Representation of Quantitative Information makes it for plots. Every element of a piece should do work.
I’d rather follow your first point up as, if you have a short comment because you took the time to purify and condense your thoughts, that’s a good thing.
But, don’t forget the overhead for the comment simply existing in the first place. You rapidly run into diminishing returns for shortening a comment to less than a few lines. Ten words conveying a thought is not effectively twice as dense as twenty words conveying that thought.