I suspect that the software used for this entire community is having a significant non-epistemic influence on our content standards and probably the composition of community itself.
Image hosting is an easier thing to comment about. In general, editorial comments about the form of the post rather than the content are frequently easier to write, but they let people socialize and gain karma just as easily (if that is their real goal). In the meantime they can be honestly helpful at first but then clog up the comments in a way that makes real discussion harder to find and harder to post in a way people might find it.
The smallest change to the site’s software that I suspect might fix this problem would be:
A radio button for comments that specifies the “meta level” of the comment as either “process” (for stuff aimed at the running of the site itself, like this very comment), or “editorial” (the comments about image hosting), or “object” (in this case, a discussion of either neurobiology or the way scientists frequently lose track of concepts as they move from theory to experiment and back again).
When a post has not yet been voted up to the main page all the posts should be defaulted to editorial unless marked otherwise by the commenter.
When a post appears on the main page all editorial comments are minimized or otherwise suppressed unless people specifically seek them out.
The smallest change to the site’s software that I suspect might fix this problem would be:
Sounds identical to Scoop, the software which runs kuro5hin.org and other sites. But I have not seen very many editorial comments outside of this discussion.
When a post has not yet been voted up to the main page all the posts should be defaulted to editorial unless marked otherwise by the commenter.
There are lots of posts with significant discussion and only a few (or zero) editorial comments that don’t end up getting promoted. The default should probably always be object level.
I suspect that the software used for this entire community is having a significant non-epistemic influence on our content standards and probably the composition of community itself.
Image hosting is an easier thing to comment about. In general, editorial comments about the form of the post rather than the content are frequently easier to write, but they let people socialize and gain karma just as easily (if that is their real goal). In the meantime they can be honestly helpful at first but then clog up the comments in a way that makes real discussion harder to find and harder to post in a way people might find it.
The smallest change to the site’s software that I suspect might fix this problem would be:
A radio button for comments that specifies the “meta level” of the comment as either “process” (for stuff aimed at the running of the site itself, like this very comment), or “editorial” (the comments about image hosting), or “object” (in this case, a discussion of either neurobiology or the way scientists frequently lose track of concepts as they move from theory to experiment and back again).
When a post has not yet been voted up to the main page all the posts should be defaulted to editorial unless marked otherwise by the commenter.
When a post appears on the main page all editorial comments are minimized or otherwise suppressed unless people specifically seek them out.
Sounds identical to Scoop, the software which runs kuro5hin.org and other sites. But I have not seen very many editorial comments outside of this discussion.
There are lots of posts with significant discussion and only a few (or zero) editorial comments that don’t end up getting promoted. The default should probably always be object level.