In the space of comments actually posted, the reverse is the case. What class of potential comments did you have in mind?
I had in mind the space of comments that would be posted if commenters received no feedback on what kinds of comments were appropriate.
ETA: My point was that there are a lot more ways for a comment to go wrong than to go right. The region of good comments is a small target in commentspace. Given only that a comment was downvoted, it could be anywhere in a vast wasteland of bad possible comments. That’s the case even if you condition on the comment’s having appeared on LW.
Of course, sometimes one knows exactly why a comment was downvoted. But, if you’re the author, and you hadn’t expected the downvote, it’s probably not so clear why you received one. In general, you can see that the comment must have been in a relatively small region within bad-comment-land. But that’s small relative to all of bad-comment-land, so even your “small” region is probably still big compared to all of good-comment-land.
I had in mind the space of comments that would be posted if commenters received no feedback on what kinds of comments were appropriate.
ETA: My point was that there are a lot more ways for a comment to go wrong than to go right. The region of good comments is a small target in commentspace. Given only that a comment was downvoted, it could be anywhere in a vast wasteland of bad possible comments. That’s the case even if you condition on the comment’s having appeared on LW.
Of course, sometimes one knows exactly why a comment was downvoted. But, if you’re the author, and you hadn’t expected the downvote, it’s probably not so clear why you received one. In general, you can see that the comment must have been in a relatively small region within bad-comment-land. But that’s small relative to all of bad-comment-land, so even your “small” region is probably still big compared to all of good-comment-land.