Seeing half a line of a comment is usually not enough information to decide whether reading the whole thing is worth while
I want to argue that this is a huge problem with the way people write here. If I have to read the whole comment to find out what the whole comment is about, that really limits the speed at which I can search the corpus. Sometimes, not only do you have to read the entire comment, carefully, you then have to think about it for a minute to decode the information. Sometimes it turns out to just a phrasing of something you already knew, in a not-interestingly different form.
If you don’t make a body of writing easy to navigate with indexes and summaries, people who value their time just wont engage with it. They wont complain to you, they’ll just fade away. They might even blame themselves. “Why can’t I process this information quicker”, they will ask. “I feel so lost and tired when I read this stuff. Overall I don’t feel I’ve had a productive time.”
If someone’s writing a whole post then for sure they should try to make its structure clear, perhaps with headings and tables of contents and introductory paragraphs and bullet points and whatnot.
I don’t think that’s usually appropriate for comments, which are usually rather short.
So, e.g., I don’t think your comment to which I’m replying right now would have been improved by adding such signposts. But, even so, I don’t see how I could tell whether I want to read the whole thing from knowing that it begins “I want to argue that this is a huge problem”.
There might be benefit in providing some sort of guidance for readers of a whole comment thread. But it’s hard to see how, especially as comment threads are dynamic: new material could appear anywhere at any time, and if order of presentation is partly determined by scores then that too can be rearranged pretty much arbitrarily. (And who’d do it?)
You might hope that a collapsed pile of comments is itself a sort of roadmap to the comments themselves, but I think that just doesn’t work, just as you wouldn’t get a useful summary of A Tale of Two Cities or A Brief History of Time by just taking the first half-sentence of each paragraph.
I want to argue that this is a huge problem with the way people write here. If I have to read the whole comment to find out what the whole comment is about, that really limits the speed at which I can search the corpus. Sometimes, not only do you have to read the entire comment, carefully, you then have to think about it for a minute to decode the information. Sometimes it turns out to just a phrasing of something you already knew, in a not-interestingly different form.
If you don’t make a body of writing easy to navigate with indexes and summaries, people who value their time just wont engage with it. They wont complain to you, they’ll just fade away. They might even blame themselves. “Why can’t I process this information quicker”, they will ask. “I feel so lost and tired when I read this stuff. Overall I don’t feel I’ve had a productive time.”
If someone’s writing a whole post then for sure they should try to make its structure clear, perhaps with headings and tables of contents and introductory paragraphs and bullet points and whatnot.
I don’t think that’s usually appropriate for comments, which are usually rather short.
So, e.g., I don’t think your comment to which I’m replying right now would have been improved by adding such signposts. But, even so, I don’t see how I could tell whether I want to read the whole thing from knowing that it begins “I want to argue that this is a huge problem”.
There might be benefit in providing some sort of guidance for readers of a whole comment thread. But it’s hard to see how, especially as comment threads are dynamic: new material could appear anywhere at any time, and if order of presentation is partly determined by scores then that too can be rearranged pretty much arbitrarily. (And who’d do it?)
You might hope that a collapsed pile of comments is itself a sort of roadmap to the comments themselves, but I think that just doesn’t work, just as you wouldn’t get a useful summary of A Tale of Two Cities or A Brief History of Time by just taking the first half-sentence of each paragraph.
I did think, as I wrote, that the beginning of the comment would be a good summary, but you’re right, not enough would be visible in the preview.
Perhaps if the comment previews were a bit longer.