Great question. IMO it’s probably worth it to try leaving what you think may be a bad comment rather than no comment at all. Sometimes what we assume is obvious or a bad comment may actually be very useful or just the feedback/fresh perspective that someone else needed.
You’ve made me realize that simply counting the comments and other criteria in my post probably doesn’t provide enough signal though. Because the first comment may indeed still be bad from the perspective of the original author/researcher or just not the kind of feedback they really needed, or else they need more of it.
But we could promote this “just go for it” attitude for initial comments as a community norm in combination with this suggestion from Jon Garcia:
What if posts could be flagged by authors and/or the community as needing feedback or discussion? This could work something like pinning to the front page, except that the “pinnedness” could decay over time to make room for other posts while getting periodically refreshed.
Then in case the initial rushed comment didn’t satisfy the author’s need for feedback, they could simply continue to leave the post flagged as still needing feedback/discussion.
It would be easy to forget to remove this tag from your posts. So every time a new comment is made, AF/LessWrong should probably prompt the author whether the tag is still necessary, or automatically remove the tag and force the author to re-add it if they still need it.
Additional incentives may be useful to make sure people don’t clutter up the tag with comments that just-kinda-sorta-would-be-nice to have more comments on. Maybe an author is limited to having 2~3 posts with this tag at a time. Or it uses some kind of bounty mechanism where comments submitted on a post with the “needs feedback” tag earn 2x karma, with the extra karma donated from the author of the post.
Great question. IMO it’s probably worth it to try leaving what you think may be a bad comment rather than no comment at all. Sometimes what we assume is obvious or a bad comment may actually be very useful or just the feedback/fresh perspective that someone else needed.
You’ve made me realize that simply counting the comments and other criteria in my post probably doesn’t provide enough signal though. Because the first comment may indeed still be bad from the perspective of the original author/researcher or just not the kind of feedback they really needed, or else they need more of it.
But we could promote this “just go for it” attitude for initial comments as a community norm in combination with this suggestion from Jon Garcia:
Then in case the initial rushed comment didn’t satisfy the author’s need for feedback, they could simply continue to leave the post flagged as still needing feedback/discussion.
It would be easy to forget to remove this tag from your posts. So every time a new comment is made, AF/LessWrong should probably prompt the author whether the tag is still necessary, or automatically remove the tag and force the author to re-add it if they still need it.
Additional incentives may be useful to make sure people don’t clutter up the tag with comments that just-kinda-sorta-would-be-nice to have more comments on. Maybe an author is limited to having 2~3 posts with this tag at a time. Or it uses some kind of bounty mechanism where comments submitted on a post with the “needs feedback” tag earn 2x karma, with the extra karma donated from the author of the post.