I think you need a proposal that is a lot clearer before it stands any substantial chance of becoming a social norm. Surely we can’t expect every comment here (or anywhere) to end with a full explicit probability distribution over all related issues. Nor can we demand that everyone reply to any reply to them. So you need some easily implementable and verifiable standards on who is expected to reply to what, and who is supposed to summarize their opinions when on what. I’m not that optimistic about his approach, but I’ll keep my mind open.
As a starting point, I’d be satisfied with getting this feature proposal implemented, and just having a norm that says that every comment that presents a contrary argument should have either an explicit reply or a disagreement status indicator set by the author of the parent of that comment, with common sense exceptions.
I realize that it might not work as well as I hope, or might even make things worse, but the cost seems low enough (compared to the potential benefits, especially if the idea catches on elsewhere) to be worth a try. It would be easy to turn the feature off if it turns out not to help.
The cost to use it is, on the face of it, at most a couple of mouse clicks. How could that be higher than the benefit of letting every reader know why the conversation ended? Perhaps I’m leaving out some hidden costs here, in which case, what do you think they are?
As for the cost to implement, I volunteer to code the feature myself, if I can get a commitment that it will be accepted (and if someone more qualified/familiar with the codebase doesn’t volunteer).
When I read a comment. I may have a vague sense of not-worth-more-time-ness. So I don’t respond.
I expect actually resolving that sense into a concrete reason to be effortful. It seems like it’d be worth it to do in many cases, but not always.
A version of this feature that sounds more likely to succeed to me, would be if it takes a mouse-click to request a reason for end of argument. I’d expect that to dramatically cut down on the number of times I’d have to resolve a vague sense into a concrete reason.
I don’t have any good ideas here, and guess that it will have to be a judgment call. We agree that the karma system has made things better, right? I hope this change will have an effect that’s similarly obvious.
I think you need a proposal that is a lot clearer before it stands any substantial chance of becoming a social norm. Surely we can’t expect every comment here (or anywhere) to end with a full explicit probability distribution over all related issues. Nor can we demand that everyone reply to any reply to them. So you need some easily implementable and verifiable standards on who is expected to reply to what, and who is supposed to summarize their opinions when on what. I’m not that optimistic about his approach, but I’ll keep my mind open.
I forgot to ask, why are you not optimistic about this approach?
The ambiguities seem difficult to surmount. Conversation is a highly evolved system and random changes are usually for the worse.
What ambiguities are you referring to? My proposed norm seems quite clear, compared to other standard norms such as “don’t flame or troll”.
Online conversations, being recent invention, probably has lots of room for improvement.
Agreed, which why I try to suggest non-random changes. :)
As a starting point, I’d be satisfied with getting this feature proposal implemented, and just having a norm that says that every comment that presents a contrary argument should have either an explicit reply or a disagreement status indicator set by the author of the parent of that comment, with common sense exceptions.
I realize that it might not work as well as I hope, or might even make things worse, but the cost seems low enough (compared to the potential benefits, especially if the idea catches on elsewhere) to be worth a try. It would be easy to turn the feature off if it turns out not to help.
There’s the cost to implement it and the cost to use it, and neither is trivial. A fine idea for fans to try, but not ready as a norm for non-fans.
The cost to use it is, on the face of it, at most a couple of mouse clicks. How could that be higher than the benefit of letting every reader know why the conversation ended? Perhaps I’m leaving out some hidden costs here, in which case, what do you think they are?
As for the cost to implement, I volunteer to code the feature myself, if I can get a commitment that it will be accepted (and if someone more qualified/familiar with the codebase doesn’t volunteer).
When I read a comment. I may have a vague sense of not-worth-more-time-ness. So I don’t respond.
I expect actually resolving that sense into a concrete reason to be effortful. It seems like it’d be worth it to do in many cases, but not always.
A version of this feature that sounds more likely to succeed to me, would be if it takes a mouse-click to request a reason for end of argument. I’d expect that to dramatically cut down on the number of times I’d have to resolve a vague sense into a concrete reason.
How do you propose to evaluate whether this feature, if and when implemented, has achieved the desired aim (or made things worse) ?
I don’t have any good ideas here, and guess that it will have to be a judgment call. We agree that the karma system has made things better, right? I hope this change will have an effect that’s similarly obvious.