I had a pretty negative initial reaction to this comment, and I am currently trying to decipher why. Here are my thoughts:
I felt some sense that you were personally threatening Connor, or trying to get him to admit a mistake. The first sentence was:
This is why you should produce offline, then upload it online.
To me this was spoken in a condescending tone, with somewhat of an “I told you so” intonation. The beginning of the next sentence read similarly to me:
I don’t know why you haven’t been doing it
Which to me was spoken in an ironic voice, meaning more something like “I don’t know how you missed such an obvious thing”.
And I think after those two sentences I had already settled on that being the tone of the comment, and that tone just felt really aggressive to me, so I downvoted it.
If that would have been the tone in which you intended the comment to be read, then I think the comment should have been justifiably downvoted. Reading your response I have a sense that you did not intend the comment to be read in the tone that I ended up reading it.
I am not really sure what the best way to deal with this is. Subtext and tone is much harder to communicate in text-only communication, and so I think authors will have to inevitably put in a bunch of effort to ensure that text does not get read in the wrong tone. The reaction of me reading the comment in this more aggressive tone happened very quickly at a highly subconscious level, and while I will try to calibrate myself here better, I am not sure how tractable an intervention on the level of “let’s just have everyone try to be more charitable when reading comments” actually is, or whether that makes sense.
For now, I think it is reasonable that this comment got downvoted, because I expect the majority of readers to read it in an aggressive tone, but also think that there is a very closeby comment that does not require significant rewriting that would get read in the correct tone.
I had a pretty negative initial reaction to this comment, and I am currently trying to decipher why. Here are my thoughts:
I felt some sense that you were personally threatening Connor, or trying to get him to admit a mistake. The first sentence was:
To me this was spoken in a condescending tone, with somewhat of an “I told you so” intonation. The beginning of the next sentence read similarly to me:
Which to me was spoken in an ironic voice, meaning more something like “I don’t know how you missed such an obvious thing”.
And I think after those two sentences I had already settled on that being the tone of the comment, and that tone just felt really aggressive to me, so I downvoted it.
If that would have been the tone in which you intended the comment to be read, then I think the comment should have been justifiably downvoted. Reading your response I have a sense that you did not intend the comment to be read in the tone that I ended up reading it.
I am not really sure what the best way to deal with this is. Subtext and tone is much harder to communicate in text-only communication, and so I think authors will have to inevitably put in a bunch of effort to ensure that text does not get read in the wrong tone. The reaction of me reading the comment in this more aggressive tone happened very quickly at a highly subconscious level, and while I will try to calibrate myself here better, I am not sure how tractable an intervention on the level of “let’s just have everyone try to be more charitable when reading comments” actually is, or whether that makes sense.
For now, I think it is reasonable that this comment got downvoted, because I expect the majority of readers to read it in an aggressive tone, but also think that there is a very closeby comment that does not require significant rewriting that would get read in the correct tone.