When you visit your friend, he says “help yourself from the kitchen”. Which read literally would give you the ability to strip the kitchen bare. Obviously it doesn’t mean that. If the friend had spoken as they meant, “take a reasonably small amount of drinks and munchies for immediate use, and not the fancy stuff or tonight’s supper”, then he would be read as being under-generous.
I suspect people run similar “what subset of their generous offer ought I to take” calculations on any wide-open offer. Taking the whole offer would be greedy.
I don’t see that as a particularly compelling explanation. OB was not just EY & RH. There were a number of other contributors, on a weekly basis even there would be non-EY/RH posts. Just look at the long list of contributors prominent in the sidebar.
If the explanation is why people will only post comments and not articles because they don’t want to take too much of what is offered, then what greater item is on offer in LW that people ‘settle’ for merely submitting articles & comments?
When you visit your friend, he says “help yourself from the kitchen”. Which read literally would give you the ability to strip the kitchen bare. Obviously it doesn’t mean that. If the friend had spoken as they meant, “take a reasonably small amount of drinks and munchies for immediate use, and not the fancy stuff or tonight’s supper”, then he would be read as being under-generous.
I suspect people run similar “what subset of their generous offer ought I to take” calculations on any wide-open offer. Taking the whole offer would be greedy.
I don’t see that as a particularly compelling explanation. OB was not just EY & RH. There were a number of other contributors, on a weekly basis even there would be non-EY/RH posts. Just look at the long list of contributors prominent in the sidebar.
If the explanation is why people will only post comments and not articles because they don’t want to take too much of what is offered, then what greater item is on offer in LW that people ‘settle’ for merely submitting articles & comments?