It seems worthwhile to give a little more of the “why” here, lest people just walk away with the confusing feeling that there are invisible electric fences that they need to creep and cringe away from.
I’ll try to lay out the why, and if I’m wrong or off, hopefully one of the mods or regular users will elaborate.
Some reasons why this type of comment doesn’t fit the LW garden:
Low information density. We want readers to be rewarded for each comment that strays across their visual field.
Cruxless/opaque/nonspecific. While it’s quite valid to leave a comment in support of another comment, we want it to be clear to readers why the other comment was deserving of more-support-than-mere-upvoting.
Self-signaling. We want LW to both be, and feel, substantially different from the generic internet-as-a-whole, meaning that some things which are innocuous but strongly reminiscent of run-of-the-mill internetting provoke a strong “no, not that” reaction.
Driving things toward “sides.” There’s the good stuff and the bad stuff, the good people and the bad people. Fundamental bucketing, less attention to detail and gradients and complexity.
Having just laid out this case, I now feel bad about a similar comment that I made today, and am going to go either edit or delete it, in the pursuit of fairness and consistency.
Ah, sorry, yeah, I agree my mod notice wasn’t specific enough. Most of my mod notice was actually about a mixture of this comment, and this other comment, that felt like it was written by the same generator, but feels more obviously bad to me (and probably to others too).
Like, the other comment that TAG left on this post felt like it was really trying to just be some kind of social flag that is common on the rest of the internet. Like, it felt like some kind of semi-ironic “Boo, outgroup” comment, and this comment felt like it was a parallel “Yay, ingroup!” comment, both of which felt like two sides of the same bad coin.
I think occasional “woo, this is great!” comments seem kind of good to me, though I also wouldn’t want them to become as everpresent on here as the rest of the internet, if they are generated by a genuine sense of excitement and compassion. But I feel like I would want those comments to not come from the same generator that then generates a snarky “oh, just like this idiot...” comment. And if I had to choose between either having both or neither, I would choose neither.
It seems worthwhile to give a little more of the “why” here, lest people just walk away with the confusing feeling that there are invisible electric fences that they need to creep and cringe away from.
I’ll try to lay out the why, and if I’m wrong or off, hopefully one of the mods or regular users will elaborate.
Some reasons why this type of comment doesn’t fit the LW garden:
Low information density. We want readers to be rewarded for each comment that strays across their visual field.
Cruxless/opaque/nonspecific. While it’s quite valid to leave a comment in support of another comment, we want it to be clear to readers why the other comment was deserving of more-support-than-mere-upvoting.
Self-signaling. We want LW to both be, and feel, substantially different from the generic internet-as-a-whole, meaning that some things which are innocuous but strongly reminiscent of run-of-the-mill internetting provoke a strong “no, not that” reaction.
Driving things toward “sides.” There’s the good stuff and the bad stuff, the good people and the bad people. Fundamental bucketing, less attention to detail and gradients and complexity.
Having just laid out this case, I now feel bad about a similar comment that I made today, and am going to go either edit or delete it, in the pursuit of fairness and consistency.
Ah, sorry, yeah, I agree my mod notice wasn’t specific enough. Most of my mod notice was actually about a mixture of this comment, and this other comment, that felt like it was written by the same generator, but feels more obviously bad to me (and probably to others too).
Like, the other comment that TAG left on this post felt like it was really trying to just be some kind of social flag that is common on the rest of the internet. Like, it felt like some kind of semi-ironic “Boo, outgroup” comment, and this comment felt like it was a parallel “Yay, ingroup!” comment, both of which felt like two sides of the same bad coin.
I think occasional “woo, this is great!” comments seem kind of good to me, though I also wouldn’t want them to become as everpresent on here as the rest of the internet, if they are generated by a genuine sense of excitement and compassion. But I feel like I would want those comments to not come from the same generator that then generates a snarky “oh, just like this idiot...” comment. And if I had to choose between either having both or neither, I would choose neither.