I don’t think that having feedback, even if only something like “I like this post”/”I disliked this post”/”I had trouble to care”, is noise. For me, this is incredibly important, and every person I talked with on this subject agreed.
Whether people agree is beside the point. Is this actually true? To figure it out, it’s necessary to be more clear on what the statement means. In what way, specifically, is this kind of feedback important? If someone says “I like your post”, it’s very hard to learn anything in particular from that. If it’s customary to say things like that, some people would just say them out of misplaced general niceness, and there will be even less meaning in the utterance. (Also, there are upvotes/downvotes to indicate precisely that kind of feedback.) Some people like hearing that someone likes their posts, but that’s different from feedback being instructive. Noise can be pleasant without being enlightening. Finally, it can be motivating to hear that your work is appreciated.
It seems that it’s false that this kind of feedback is important for learning things, but true that it’s important for motivation of some authors. These are different claims that shouldn’t be mixed up. When you say “every person I talked with on this subject agreed”, do you (or they) know what exactly they agree with?
I don’t think it will actually push readers away, because they are in total control of their level of commitment.
Unfortunately, norms don’t like nuance. This post is very far from igniting a norm, but if hypothetically what it suggests bears fruit, it will be in the form of a norm to comment more, and that norm will end up punishing defectors regardless of whether that was an intended feature of the norm or not.
Whether people agree is beside the point. Is this actually true? To figure it out, it’s necessary to be more clear on what the statement means. In what way, specifically, is this kind of feedback important? If someone says “I like your post”, it’s very hard to learn anything in particular from that. If it’s customary to say things like that, some people would just say them out of misplaced general niceness, and there will be even less meaning in the utterance. (Also, there are upvotes/downvotes to indicate precisely that kind of feedback.) Some people like hearing that someone likes their posts, but that’s different from feedback being instructive. Noise can be pleasant without being enlightening. Finally, it can be motivating to hear that your work is appreciated.
It seems that it’s false that this kind of feedback is important for learning things, but true that it’s important for motivation of some authors. These are different claims that shouldn’t be mixed up. When you say “every person I talked with on this subject agreed”, do you (or they) know what exactly they agree with?
Unfortunately, norms don’t like nuance. This post is very far from igniting a norm, but if hypothetically what it suggests bears fruit, it will be in the form of a norm to comment more, and that norm will end up punishing defectors regardless of whether that was an intended feature of the norm or not.