I really don’t get the psychology of people who won’t use a site without being able to unilaterally ban people (or rather I can only think of uncharitable hypotheses). Why can’t they just ignore those they don’t want to engage with, maybe with the help of a mute or ignore feature (which can also mark the ignored comments/threads in some way to notify others)?
Comment threads are conversations! If you have one person in a conversation who can’t see other participants, everything gets confusing and weird. Points brought up in an adjacent thread suddenly have to be relitigated or repeated. The conversation has trouble moving forward, its hard to build any kind of common knowledge of assumptions, and people get annoyed at each other for not knowing the same things, because they aren’t reading the same content.
I would hate comment sections on LW where I had no idea which other comments my interlocutors have read. I don’t always assume that every person I am responding to has read all other comments in a thread, but I do generally assume they have read most of them, and that this is informing whatever conversation we are having in this subthread.
Comment threads are a useful mechanism for structuring local interactions, but whole comment sections proceed as a highly interconnected conversation, not as individual comment threads, and splintering the knowledge and participation graph of that seems much more costly than alternatives to me.
(Contrast LW with Twitter where indeed the conversations generally proceed much more just based on a single thread, or quote-threads, and my experience there is that whenever I respond to someone, I just end up having the same conversation 10 times, as opposed to on LW, where I generally feel that when I respond to someone, I won’t have 10 more people comment or ask with the same confusion)
Comment threads are conversations! If you have one person in a conversation who can’t see other participants, everything gets confusing and weird.
The additional confusion seems pretty minimal, if the muted comments are clearly marked so others are aware that the author can’t see them. (Compare to the baseline confusion where I’m already pretty unsure who has read which other comments.)
I just don’t get how this is worse than making it so that certain perspectives are completely missing from the comments.
Comment threads are conversations! If you have one person in a conversation who can’t see other participants, everything gets confusing and weird. Points brought up in an adjacent thread suddenly have to be relitigated or repeated. The conversation has trouble moving forward, its hard to build any kind of common knowledge of assumptions, and people get annoyed at each other for not knowing the same things, because they aren’t reading the same content.
I would hate comment sections on LW where I had no idea which other comments my interlocutors have read. I don’t always assume that every person I am responding to has read all other comments in a thread, but I do generally assume they have read most of them, and that this is informing whatever conversation we are having in this subthread.
Comment threads are a useful mechanism for structuring local interactions, but whole comment sections proceed as a highly interconnected conversation, not as individual comment threads, and splintering the knowledge and participation graph of that seems much more costly than alternatives to me.
(Contrast LW with Twitter where indeed the conversations generally proceed much more just based on a single thread, or quote-threads, and my experience there is that whenever I respond to someone, I just end up having the same conversation 10 times, as opposed to on LW, where I generally feel that when I respond to someone, I won’t have 10 more people comment or ask with the same confusion)
The additional confusion seems pretty minimal, if the muted comments are clearly marked so others are aware that the author can’t see them. (Compare to the baseline confusion where I’m already pretty unsure who has read which other comments.)
I just don’t get how this is worse than making it so that certain perspectives are completely missing from the comments.