Personally I much prefer to comment in public places, due to not wanting my comments to be “wasted”, so I’m having trouble understanding the psychology of people who seem to prefer the opposite.
1) In a word—karma. (While people do judge, there is a lower risk of not being able to say, comment there or elsewhere (for a long time) if you got a lot of negative karma from one place. As someone who got some negative karma from a comment that entirely missed the point of a piece because the piece wasn’t clear, I can imagine this problem would be MUCH worse with a draft—it’s all about idea formation, and and karma might be detrimental to that, especially since it isn’t necessarily a good metric for the task at hand, whether that’s discussion &/or turning a draft into a paper. (A system which encourages people to purge comments of theirs that are downvoted may not be the best place to write drafts.))
2) Maybe it’s because more people use google docs—possibly also for other things. Greater tool familiarity = greater tool use.
3) A different group. People are discussing things in a different place because of who is there, or because people do things differently there or because things work differently there. (Maybe people are notified when comments are made and that’s a valuable feature in writing drafts?)
1) In a word—karma. (While people do judge, there is a lower risk of not being able to say, comment there or elsewhere (for a long time) if you got a lot of negative karma from one place. As someone who got some negative karma from a comment that entirely missed the point of a piece because the piece wasn’t clear, I can imagine this problem would be MUCH worse with a draft—it’s all about idea formation, and and karma might be detrimental to that, especially since it isn’t necessarily a good metric for the task at hand, whether that’s discussion &/or turning a draft into a paper. (A system which encourages people to purge comments of theirs that are downvoted may not be the best place to write drafts.))
2) Maybe it’s because more people use google docs—possibly also for other things. Greater tool familiarity = greater tool use.
3) A different group. People are discussing things in a different place because of who is there, or because people do things differently there or because things work differently there. (Maybe people are notified when comments are made and that’s a valuable feature in writing drafts?)