I love the idea of having private comments on posts. Sometimes I want to point out nitpicky things like grammatical errors or how something could have been phrased differently. But I don’t want to “take up space” with an inconsequential comment like that, and don’t want to appear nitpicky. Private comments would solve those sorts of problems. Another alternative feature might be different comment sections for a given post. Like, a “nitpicks” section, a “stupid questions” section, a “thanks” section.
I have an impression that, as Said Achmitz already noted, if it were required that if you delete a comment, you must explain why, people would feel much less aversion to this policy. I feel like there’s something particularly frustrating about having a comment of yours just deleted out of thin air without any explanation as to why. Feels very Big Brother-y.
One thing that I like about this is that regardless of whether or not it works, it’s an experiment. You can’t improve without trying new things. I generally applaud efforts to experiment. It makes me feel excited about the future of Less Wrong. “What cool features will we end up stumbling upon over the next 12 months?”
I personally don’t see that there is much of a need for this comment moderation. On the rest of the internet, there’s tons of trolls and idiots. But here I feel like very, very few comments are so bad that someone would want to delete them. And in the few cases where they are that bad, they get downvoted heavily and appear minimized so as to be unintrusive. I think you guys do a great job with product development and are all really smart so I fear that I’m being too uncharitable in asking this, but how much user research has been done before spending time developing this feature? One exercise that I think would be useful is to go through some sample of comments and judge how many of them are delete-worthy. If that percentage is under some number (eg. 1%), perhaps the feature isn’t needed, or at least be worth deprioritizing. Very few comments seem to be downvoted to less than, say, −3, which makes me think that the result of the experiment would show that very few comments are delete-worthy.
I love the idea of having private comments on posts. Sometimes I want to point out nitpicky things like grammatical errors or how something could have been phrased differently. But I don’t want to “take up space” with an inconsequential comment like that, and don’t want to appear nitpicky. Private comments would solve those sorts of problems. Another alternative feature might be different comment sections for a given post. Like, a “nitpicks” section, a “stupid questions” section, a “thanks” section.
I have an impression that, as Said Achmitz already noted, if it were required that if you delete a comment, you must explain why, people would feel much less aversion to this policy. I feel like there’s something particularly frustrating about having a comment of yours just deleted out of thin air without any explanation as to why. Feels very Big Brother-y.
One thing that I like about this is that regardless of whether or not it works, it’s an experiment. You can’t improve without trying new things. I generally applaud efforts to experiment. It makes me feel excited about the future of Less Wrong. “What cool features will we end up stumbling upon over the next 12 months?”
I personally don’t see that there is much of a need for this comment moderation. On the rest of the internet, there’s tons of trolls and idiots. But here I feel like very, very few comments are so bad that someone would want to delete them. And in the few cases where they are that bad, they get downvoted heavily and appear minimized so as to be unintrusive. I think you guys do a great job with product development and are all really smart so I fear that I’m being too uncharitable in asking this, but how much user research has been done before spending time developing this feature? One exercise that I think would be useful is to go through some sample of comments and judge how many of them are delete-worthy. If that percentage is under some number (eg. 1%), perhaps the feature isn’t needed, or at least be worth deprioritizing. Very few comments seem to be downvoted to less than, say, −3, which makes me think that the result of the experiment would show that very few comments are delete-worthy.