How about “I don’t understand X, can someone explain?” comments? I don’t see those very often, but I think they would be pretty awesome! The person with the question gets their question answered; other people with the question get an answer; people who didn’t have the question get some cross-linking; it provides an easy way for lurkers to participate more; and this activity on the post provides encouragement to the author. I’ve had this in my mind as something to do more often for a while but haven’t taken much action on it for some reason.
I agree with this. Thinking about it, I think it’s very easy to just slide past posts that I don’t understand on the assumption that explaining more would be tedious for the author. But this doesn’t make sense since I never find such comments tedious on my own posts.
How about “I don’t understand X, can someone explain?” comments? I don’t see those very often, but I think they would be pretty awesome! The person with the question gets their question answered; other people with the question get an answer; people who didn’t have the question get some cross-linking; it provides an easy way for lurkers to participate more; and this activity on the post provides encouragement to the author. I’ve had this in my mind as something to do more often for a while but haven’t taken much action on it for some reason.
I agree with this. Thinking about it, I think it’s very easy to just slide past posts that I don’t understand on the assumption that explaining more would be tedious for the author. But this doesn’t make sense since I never find such comments tedious on my own posts.
Right. And there are probably many people other than the author who can respond to your question as well.