That reason sounds incomplete, but I think I know what the person is talking about.
The best example I can think of is Normal Cryonics. The post was partly a personal celebration of a positive experience and partly about the lousiness of parents that don’t sign their kids up for cryonics. Yet, the comments mostly ignored this and it became a discussion about the facts of the post—can you really get cryonics for $300 a year? Why should a person sign up or not sign up?
The post itself was voted up to 33, but only 3 to 5 comments out of 868 disparaged parents in agreement. There’s definitely a disconnect.
Also, on mediocre posts and/or posts that people haven’t related to, people will talk about the post for a few comments and then it will be an open discussion as though the post just provided a keyword. But I don’t see much problem with this. The post provided a topic, that’s all.
Every article on cryonics becomes a general cryonics discussion forum. My recent sequence of posts on the subject on my blog carry explicit injunctions to discuss what the post actually says, but it seems to make no difference; people share whatever anti-cryonics argument they can think of without doing any reading or thinking no matter how unrelated to the subject of the post.
I should have followed my initial instinct when I saw that, of immediately posting a new top level article with body text that read exactly “Talk about AGW here”.
That reason sounds incomplete, but I think I know what the person is talking about.
The best example I can think of is Normal Cryonics. The post was partly a personal celebration of a positive experience and partly about the lousiness of parents that don’t sign their kids up for cryonics. Yet, the comments mostly ignored this and it became a discussion about the facts of the post—can you really get cryonics for $300 a year? Why should a person sign up or not sign up?
The post itself was voted up to 33, but only 3 to 5 comments out of 868 disparaged parents in agreement. There’s definitely a disconnect.
Also, on mediocre posts and/or posts that people haven’t related to, people will talk about the post for a few comments and then it will be an open discussion as though the post just provided a keyword. But I don’t see much problem with this. The post provided a topic, that’s all.
I don’t see a terrible problem with comments being “a discussion about the facts of the post”; that’s the point of comments, isn’t it?
Perhaps we just need an Open Threads category. We can have an open thread on cryonics, quantum mechanics and many worlds, Bayesian probability, etc.
Every article on cryonics becomes a general cryonics discussion forum. My recent sequence of posts on the subject on my blog carry explicit injunctions to discuss what the post actually says, but it seems to make no difference; people share whatever anti-cryonics argument they can think of without doing any reading or thinking no matter how unrelated to the subject of the post.
Same with this article becoming a talking shop about AGW.
I should have followed my initial instinct when I saw that, of immediately posting a new top level article with body text that read exactly “Talk about AGW here”.