The free space for responses and rebuttals isn’t supposed to be the comments of the post, but the ability to write a different post in reply.
I want to just note, for the sake of the hypothesis space, a probably-useless idea: There could somehow be more affordance for a middle ground of “offshoot” posting. In other words, structurally formalize / enable the pattern that Anna exhibited in here comment here:
And the ensuing discussion seemed productive. This kinda a bit like quote-tweeting as opposed to replying. The difference between just making your own shortform post would be that it’s a shortform post, but also paired with a comment on the original post. This would be useful if, as in the above example, the OP author asked for a topic to be discussed in a different venue; or if a commenter wants to discuss something, and also notify the author, and also make their comment visible to other people reading the comments on the OP, but wants to have their own venue or wants to avoid taking up attention in the OP because of off-topic or whatever reason.
That’s not a bad idea. You could link something like “this post is a reply to X” and then people could explore “threads” of posts that are all rebuttals and arguments surrounding a single specific topic. Doesn’t even need to be about things that have gotten this hostile, sometimes you just want to write a full post because it’s more organic than a comment.
Right. I realized later that I framed this as something the commenter decides; it would also be possible to have this sort of thing replace authors deleting comments or ban users. The author could press the “boot” button, and then this boots the comment out of the comment section. But it doesn’t delete it, it just moves all discussion to wherever the comment was booted to (e.g. open thread or quick take or something). Maybe it also hides most of the comment, and shows a single response from the author. (Not especially advocating for this.)
I want to just note, for the sake of the hypothesis space, a probably-useless idea: There could somehow be more affordance for a middle ground of “offshoot” posting. In other words, structurally formalize / enable the pattern that Anna exhibited in here comment here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AZwgfgmW8QvnbEisc/cfar-update-and-new-cfar-workshops?commentId=N2r5xTerxfxtfeLCJ
on her post, where she asked for a topic to be budded off to another venue. Adele then did so here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n299hFwqBxqwJfZyN/adele-lopez-s-shortform?commentId=k326Yx3vYBzQntS4j
And the ensuing discussion seemed productive. This kinda a bit like quote-tweeting as opposed to replying. The difference between just making your own shortform post would be that it’s a shortform post, but also paired with a comment on the original post. This would be useful if, as in the above example, the OP author asked for a topic to be discussed in a different venue; or if a commenter wants to discuss something, and also notify the author, and also make their comment visible to other people reading the comments on the OP, but wants to have their own venue or wants to avoid taking up attention in the OP because of off-topic or whatever reason.
That’s not a bad idea. You could link something like “this post is a reply to X” and then people could explore “threads” of posts that are all rebuttals and arguments surrounding a single specific topic. Doesn’t even need to be about things that have gotten this hostile, sometimes you just want to write a full post because it’s more organic than a comment.
Right. I realized later that I framed this as something the commenter decides; it would also be possible to have this sort of thing replace authors deleting comments or ban users. The author could press the “boot” button, and then this boots the comment out of the comment section. But it doesn’t delete it, it just moves all discussion to wherever the comment was booted to (e.g. open thread or quick take or something). Maybe it also hides most of the comment, and shows a single response from the author. (Not especially advocating for this.)