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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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This is the third top level comment in a row on the same topic. Not everyone wants to discuss this topic, it is generally a courtesy to keep a single topic of discussion to a single top level thread. If a current news event topic is way too large (like the Ukraine war, or the Israel-gaza war) then we will try and create a separate thread dedicated just to that topic.

@iprayiam3 and @Frequent_Anybody2984 please try and follow this courtesy for others users.

Sorry! I initially had a much better comment that would have been top level worthy imo but it got deleted by a cat. I should have posted that one as a response.

Understood, but meta food for thought:

  1. when you're responding to two existing top levels at once, it's hard to. Especially when it's increasing branches of generalization. Ben's OP was an analogy for a epistemic process, but delved very densly into a narrow score-keeping point about economics. Sometimes 'thematic' trends are hard to distinguish new topic from old.
  2. The suggested flow is somewhat less effective than it was on Reddit for whatever reason, I'm not sure of. By the time a topic is a day old and two down, it's effectively dead. This flow strattles the line (poorly imo) evenescent stream of conversation and post-style topics. We end up with, in the worst of both worlds IMO- uncommented on posts, vs fleeting conversations.

To the extreme effect, Ben's own post was a response to a thread from last week. He, correctly I imagine, top-leveled it here instead of responding there because that CWR post was effectively dead. The same effect works at a micro scale on top levels within a post. I don't have a suggestion for how to fix, but I'd be interested if anyone else notices it worse than it used to be?

Perhaps, I've just gotten used to DSL's forum style of functionally bumping discussions with the newest comment to the top. Perhaps some of it the (contentious) hiding of thumbs up for so long, but it ends up feeling like posting anything 'down thread' feels like shouting into the void.

Okay, Ben's top level response was to his own post that was a day old. I feel I need to clear that up so as not to present it as being somehow more acceptable than yours or frequent_anybody's.

But, to me, top level responses don't just dilute things to being a single topic that other people might not be interested in but generally feel rude or at the very least represent an etiquette faux pas that can cause unnecessary social strife. The implication being something along the lines of "your response was so bad I need to make another topic just to deal with it." or "I'm so right and you're so wrong that I'm taking this to a top level comment to give my argument that much more value."

Whether or not that's right, I see it that way sometimes, and I can imagine others do as well, and there's no way that's not going to ruffle other people who aren't bypassing the usual method of just responding to someone below their comment.

That's all fair. I can accept that this shouldn't have been a top level.

But you both basically caused the original thread to fall further. Id get it more if there were like five other posts that buried the original discussion, but there aren't.

The sort by new means that your post would have been second if you had both just posted in the original topic. Does being the second post from the top really make you feel like a thread is buried?

And there is a slippery slope problem here. If you two do it, what if everyone that responds to you also just chooses to post at the top level? The threading becomes a useless feature. Your thread gets buried even faster than normal, and no one is happy.

Three posts on one topic isn't bad for readability, but breaking a suggested rule twice in a row is bad for the legibility of suggested rules. I specifically do not want people to see these two courtesy violations and think "ah I should do that too".

There is nothing wrong with reviving a dead topic from last week.

But you both basically caused the original thread to fall further. Id get it more if there were like five other posts that buried the original discussion, but there aren't.

The sort by new means that your post would have been second if you had both just posted in the original topic. Does being the second post from the top really make you feel like a thread is buried?

And there is a slippery slope problem here. If you two do it, what if everyone that responds to you also just chooses to post at the top level? The threading becomes a useless feature. Your thread gets buried even faster than normal, and no one is happy.

Three posts on one topic isn't bad for readability, but breaking a suggested rule twice in a row is bad for the legibility of suggested rules. I specifically do not want people to see these two courtesy violations and think "ah I should do that too".

Fair enough

There is nothing wrong with reviving a dead topic from last week.

I didn't mean to suggest there is

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