Let’s see if I can give constructive advice to the parties in question.
First, I’ll address Said, on the subject of asking for examples (and this will inform some later commentary to Duncan):
It might be helpful, when asking for examples, to include a few words about why, or what kind of examples you’re looking for, or other information. This serves multiple purposes: (a) it can help the author choose a good example and good explanation [and avoid wasteful “No, not that kind of example; I wanted [...]” exchanges]; (b) it signals cognitive effort on your part and helps to distinguish you from a “low-effort obtuse fool or nitpicker”; (c) it gives the author feedback about how their post landed with real users [based on you as a sample, plus the votes on your comment suggesting how the rest of the audience feels]; (d) a sort of proof-of-work assures other people that you care at least some amount about getting their reply.
Examples of being a little more specific:
I am skeptical of your claim. Can you give an example?
To add weight to this, you could say “I googled X and the most plausible result was Y, which still doesn’t match your claim.” (As a general principle, if it’s worth posting a comment, it’s worth doing a Google search.)
Your point is stated very abstractly and I’m not sure what you mean. Could you illustrate with an example?
I can think of a couple of interpretations of your position, some of which I think are wrong, but I’d rather not argue against a position you don’t actually hold. Could you give an example in xyz scenario?
That’s an amazing claim, and any examples would be delicious and things I’d like to look at further. Could you point me at any?
Sometimes it does work fine to ask the bare question without giving any other data about your thought-process, but I expect it’s usually hard to be sure that this is true of any particular situation.
To Duncan:
It seems that an important part of your perspective is the perception that leaving a question or criticism unanswered makes it look like the criticism is well-founded, and the author has realized he’s wrong and is too cowardly to admit it, or something like that. This then leads to the pressure you say you feel, to engage in the effortful process of replying to all the criticisms/questions.
I note that, on Less Wrong, there are vote counters. I submit that if there’s a one-word “Examples?” comment that is downvoted with no replies, this looks plausibly to bystanders like “an obtuse low-effort poster asking a dumb question, not worthy of the author’s time”. This generalizes to more verbose comments as well. I do often read downvoted comments anyway, but much of the time (not quite always) I agree that they should be downvoted and aren’t worth people’s time. Conversely, if it is highly upvoted, that is evidence that something wasn’t clear to a bunch of your readers, which seems to make it worth addressing.
So you could downvote what you perceive to be low-effort obtuse questions/criticisms. In fact, you have plenty of karma, so your strong downvote is powerful. Then maybe you check back a day later, and if it’s been upvoted significantly (which should be rare if your evaluation of these comments is well-calibrated), then you feel pressure to reply. (Or maybe not even then; on many forums, threads fall off the front page and people just stop bothering to reply, partly because few will see it. Spend more time on Hacker News to experience this.) In principle one could imagine forum features like “ignore this comment until karma reaches threshold” or “notify me when karma reaches threshold”.
I note that you sometimes post on Facebook, where there is no downvote button. I wonder if some of your beliefs about commenting come from there.
You could also advertise in the moderation guidelines on your posts that you’ll downvote low-effort comments.
Come to think of it, I think you even have the power to delete comments on your posts. Delete them with messages like “low-effort obtuse question” when appropriate. There’s certainly a part of me that is uneasy about suppressing any comments from anyone, but once you accept that any moderation at all is to be done, it seems like that would be a thing to do.
Have you been doing much of the above? Are there major problems with it?
Let’s see if I can give constructive advice to the parties in question.
First, I’ll address Said, on the subject of asking for examples (and this will inform some later commentary to Duncan):
It might be helpful, when asking for examples, to include a few words about why, or what kind of examples you’re looking for, or other information. This serves multiple purposes: (a) it can help the author choose a good example and good explanation [and avoid wasteful “No, not that kind of example; I wanted [...]” exchanges]; (b) it signals cognitive effort on your part and helps to distinguish you from a “low-effort obtuse fool or nitpicker”; (c) it gives the author feedback about how their post landed with real users [based on you as a sample, plus the votes on your comment suggesting how the rest of the audience feels]; (d) a sort of proof-of-work assures other people that you care at least some amount about getting their reply.
Examples of being a little more specific:
I am skeptical of your claim. Can you give an example?
To add weight to this, you could say “I googled X and the most plausible result was Y, which still doesn’t match your claim.” (As a general principle, if it’s worth posting a comment, it’s worth doing a Google search.)
Your point is stated very abstractly and I’m not sure what you mean. Could you illustrate with an example?
I can think of a couple of interpretations of your position, some of which I think are wrong, but I’d rather not argue against a position you don’t actually hold. Could you give an example in xyz scenario?
That’s an amazing claim, and any examples would be delicious and things I’d like to look at further. Could you point me at any?
Sometimes it does work fine to ask the bare question without giving any other data about your thought-process, but I expect it’s usually hard to be sure that this is true of any particular situation.
To Duncan:
It seems that an important part of your perspective is the perception that leaving a question or criticism unanswered makes it look like the criticism is well-founded, and the author has realized he’s wrong and is too cowardly to admit it, or something like that. This then leads to the pressure you say you feel, to engage in the effortful process of replying to all the criticisms/questions.
I note that, on Less Wrong, there are vote counters. I submit that if there’s a one-word “Examples?” comment that is downvoted with no replies, this looks plausibly to bystanders like “an obtuse low-effort poster asking a dumb question, not worthy of the author’s time”. This generalizes to more verbose comments as well. I do often read downvoted comments anyway, but much of the time (not quite always) I agree that they should be downvoted and aren’t worth people’s time. Conversely, if it is highly upvoted, that is evidence that something wasn’t clear to a bunch of your readers, which seems to make it worth addressing.
So you could downvote what you perceive to be low-effort obtuse questions/criticisms. In fact, you have plenty of karma, so your strong downvote is powerful. Then maybe you check back a day later, and if it’s been upvoted significantly (which should be rare if your evaluation of these comments is well-calibrated), then you feel pressure to reply. (Or maybe not even then; on many forums, threads fall off the front page and people just stop bothering to reply, partly because few will see it. Spend more time on Hacker News to experience this.) In principle one could imagine forum features like “ignore this comment until karma reaches threshold” or “notify me when karma reaches threshold”.
I note that you sometimes post on Facebook, where there is no downvote button. I wonder if some of your beliefs about commenting come from there.
You could also advertise in the moderation guidelines on your posts that you’ll downvote low-effort comments.
Come to think of it, I think you even have the power to delete comments on your posts. Delete them with messages like “low-effort obtuse question” when appropriate. There’s certainly a part of me that is uneasy about suppressing any comments from anyone, but once you accept that any moderation at all is to be done, it seems like that would be a thing to do.
Have you been doing much of the above? Are there major problems with it?