Anyone writing an effortful response to the original post should be presumed to have good faith to some reasonable degree, and any point that you think they ignored was probably either misunderstood, or the relevance of the point is not obvious to the author of the comment. By responding in a harsh way to what might be a non-obvious misunderstanding, you’re essentially adopting the conflict side of the “mistake vs conflict theory” side of things.
Any comments which aren’t effortful and are easily seen to have an answer in the original post will probably just be downvoted anyway, and the proper response from OP is to just not respond at all.
To be clear, I think that the community here is probably kind enough so that these aren’t big problems, but it still kind of irks me to make it slightly easier to be unkind.
My feeling is this is optimistic. There are people who will fire off a lot of words without having read carefully, so the prior isn’t that strong that there’s good faith, and unfortunately, I don’t think the downvote response is always clear enough to make it feel ok to an author to leave unresponded to. Especially if a comment is lengthy, not as many people will read and downvote it.
I agree that getting a low-effort emoji in response to a lot of good faith effort sucks. But I think that scenario is already pretty well handled with normal replies. There are enough cases that aren’t handled well by replies, and might be really well handled by reacts, that I’m glad they’re making them. But it’s still important to track costs like the one you’re bringing up.
Anyone writing an effortful response to the original post should be presumed to have good faith to some reasonable degree, and any point that you think they ignored was probably either misunderstood, or the relevance of the point is not obvious to the author of the comment. By responding in a harsh way to what might be a non-obvious misunderstanding, you’re essentially adopting the conflict side of the “mistake vs conflict theory” side of things.
Any comments which aren’t effortful and are easily seen to have an answer in the original post will probably just be downvoted anyway, and the proper response from OP is to just not respond at all.
To be clear, I think that the community here is probably kind enough so that these aren’t big problems, but it still kind of irks me to make it slightly easier to be unkind.
My feeling is this is optimistic. There are people who will fire off a lot of words without having read carefully, so the prior isn’t that strong that there’s good faith, and unfortunately, I don’t think the downvote response is always clear enough to make it feel ok to an author to leave unresponded to. Especially if a comment is lengthy, not as many people will read and downvote it.
I agree that getting a low-effort emoji in response to a lot of good faith effort sucks. But I think that scenario is already pretty well handled with normal replies. There are enough cases that aren’t handled well by replies, and might be really well handled by reacts, that I’m glad they’re making them. But it’s still important to track costs like the one you’re bringing up.