One thing I noticed by writing a blog slash posting here, is that the rules for posts and comments are importantly different. In comments you have discussion norms in a way you don’t for main posts, and for main posts you have an on-the-record property that comments don’t have. So when writing comments, one needs to be very careful about certain types of norms of fairness and politeness, and forms of argumentation, and be even more careful about rhetorical flourish.
But in exchange there’s an understanding that you’re not held to your statements and positions (outside of the comment section itself, at least) the way a post would be. Thus, I draw a distinction that if I put something in a post it is ‘fair game’ to be quoted and held as my position in an outside context, whereas a comment doesn’t do that, it’s on the record but it’s exploratory, and in several cases I’ve used it to say things in comments that I didn’t feel comfortable saying in full posts.
Right now I believe the way we handle issues with top-level posts is to not promote them to front page if there are problems, and only curate them if they’re excellent, combined with lots of voting, which seems pretty good. When I do things that are against LW norms (which I occasionally do since all my blog posts are auto-posted here) I have no problem getting the message that I did that (whether or not I already knew that I’d done that) through these systems.
One thing I noticed by writing a blog slash posting here, is that the rules for posts and comments are importantly different. In comments you have discussion norms in a way you don’t for main posts, and for main posts you have an on-the-record property that comments don’t have. So when writing comments, one needs to be very careful about certain types of norms of fairness and politeness, and forms of argumentation, and be even more careful about rhetorical flourish.
But in exchange there’s an understanding that you’re not held to your statements and positions (outside of the comment section itself, at least) the way a post would be. Thus, I draw a distinction that if I put something in a post it is ‘fair game’ to be quoted and held as my position in an outside context, whereas a comment doesn’t do that, it’s on the record but it’s exploratory, and in several cases I’ve used it to say things in comments that I didn’t feel comfortable saying in full posts.
Right now I believe the way we handle issues with top-level posts is to not promote them to front page if there are problems, and only curate them if they’re excellent, combined with lots of voting, which seems pretty good. When I do things that are against LW norms (which I occasionally do since all my blog posts are auto-posted here) I have no problem getting the message that I did that (whether or not I already knew that I’d done that) through these systems.