I notice that I often want to reply to LW posts with a joke, sometimes because it’s funny, sometimes just as a way to engage a bit with the post when I liked it but don’t otherwise have anything meaningful to say.
I notice that there’s some mixed things going on here.
I want LW to be a place for high quality discussion.
A potential solution is the “Offtopic” comment section we’ve been thinking about but haven’t implemented yet, where either *I* can opt into marking a comment as “offtopic” (i.e. making less of a claim of other people finding it a good use of their time), or an author can if they don’t like jokes.
I think authors generally are more rewarded by comments than by upvotes.
Curious if you’ve done some sort of survey on this. My own feelings are that I care less about the average comment on one of my posts than 10 karma, and I care less about that than I do about a really very good comment (which might intuitively be worth like 30 karma) (but maybe I’m not provoking the right comments?). In general, I don’t have an intuitive sense that comments are all that important except for the info value when reading, and I guess the ‘people care about me’ value as an incentive to write. I do like the idea of the thing I wrote being woven into the way people think, but I don’t feel like comments are the best way for that to happen.
A potential solution is the “Offtopic” comment section we’ve been thinking about but haven’t implemented yet, where either *I* can opt into marking a comment as “offtopic” (i.e. making less of a claim of other people finding it a good use of their time), or an author can if they don’t like jokes.
While this sounds like a great idea, eventually there will be on topic jokes.
I notice that I often want to reply to LW posts with a joke, sometimes because it’s funny, sometimes just as a way to engage a bit with the post when I liked it but don’t otherwise have anything meaningful to say.
I notice that there’s some mixed things going on here.
I want LW to be a place for high quality discussion.
I think it’s actually pretty bad that comprehensive, high quality posts often get less engagement because there’s not much to add or contradict. I think authors generally are more rewarded by comments than by upvotes.
A potential solution is the “Offtopic” comment section we’ve been thinking about but haven’t implemented yet, where either *I* can opt into marking a comment as “offtopic” (i.e. making less of a claim of other people finding it a good use of their time), or an author can if they don’t like jokes.
Me: *makes joke*
Vaniver: I want you to post it on LessWrong so I can downvote it.
Curious if you’ve done some sort of survey on this. My own feelings are that I care less about the average comment on one of my posts than 10 karma, and I care less about that than I do about a really very good comment (which might intuitively be worth like 30 karma) (but maybe I’m not provoking the right comments?). In general, I don’t have an intuitive sense that comments are all that important except for the info value when reading, and I guess the ‘people care about me’ value as an incentive to write. I do like the idea of the thing I wrote being woven into the way people think, but I don’t feel like comments are the best way for that to happen.
While this sounds like a great idea, eventually there will be on topic jokes.