A plea for more thoughtful comments

Posted May 29, 2024 18:14 UTC (Wed) by greatquux (guest, #171711)
Parent article: A plea for more thoughtful comments

I have also noticed you having to intervene more lately as well, and for a lot of what seem like just trivial arguments. Perhaps it's just the stress levels in the world right now? You mentioned a comment quota, and I've not heard of that kind of idea anywhere else, but it seems like it could work! If you know you've only got X number of comments a day (to come up with that number you'd probably have to run some kind of historical analysis combined with closing your eyes and pointing at the screen) you may not choose to spend it on a nonsensical and emotional reply, or it might cause you to think just a moment longer about it. It could be easier and work better than the ubiquitous comment upvote/downvote system implemented everywhere else (which is at least something, but I suspect there must be something better).

A plea for more thoughtful comments

Posted May 29, 2024 22:21 UTC (Wed) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (4 responses)

I have heard of this idea somewhere else! I believe it's one of the IETF rules; one may send no more than 3 emails per day to any given working group.

This is quite a mindset change from Linux forums where each response deserves its individual response. It encourages one long thoughtful email responding to all the responses.

At least, that's the theory. I have no direct experience of participating. I'm sure those who do can speak to how well it works.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

Posted May 30, 2024 7:24 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Just a few ideas on quotas - is it possible to put a "contentious" flag on certain articles? This would then cause a quota mechanism to kick in - maybe 5 comments per day per article?

Or if we want a site-wide quota, please don't say "X per day". I think a "rolling quota" is better, ie you get let's say an allowance of 10 a day. These would then accumulate to a maximum of say 70 (7 days). So somebody who doesn't comment much would have pretty much 70 available at all times. Someone who gets into comment fests at regular intervals wouldn't have many most of the time :-)

Cheers,
Wol

A plea for more thoughtful comments

Posted May 30, 2024 11:55 UTC (Thu) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438) [Link]

This is kind of like what Discourse does with "slow mode" and it's been often effective, I believe.

If the "contentious" flag could be applied to comment threads, it could slow down flame war tangents without limiting commenting on a parent article. The quota would have to be site-wide or per-top-post rather than per-flagged-post for it to be effective, in that case. That would also make it sensible to have a fairly low quota.

Also, I'd fully support LWN staff setting someone's current available quota of this sort to zero if they ignore an explicit request to cease and desist when they currently have remaining quota. They have moderated with a very light touch and earned lots of trust here. And frankly, those most persistent at ignoring LWN staff requests for civility might reasonably eventually be given smaller or even zero quota for replies on contentious threads/articles on an ongoing basis. Spendthrifts of trust do not lightly re-earn trust.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

Posted May 30, 2024 17:05 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (1 responses)

> I believe it's one of the IETF rules; one may send no more than 3 emails per day to any given working group.

I don't think so. Maybe it's suggested somewhere but I don't remember about this. I've been participating to super-long threads in the past on heated debates, a-la LKML. And even without this, it happens that there are multiple topics in parallel that deserve a discussion, and you're sometimes only available on week-end to respond to everything, so it's very possible that I've sent 10 to 20 mails a single day and been silent for a week for example.

I think that something which could possibly work would be to limit both the depth and number of messages in a thread depending on the depth. It would force responders to respond to the more general topic rather than the contentious point. After all, (except for maybe some rare possibly vocal participants), a degenerating thread often involves multiple people, and if one reaches their limit, another one could continue. On the opposite, saying that the thread is full, talk about something else could generally work better. At least I think so :-)

A plea for more thoughtful comments

Posted Jun 13, 2024 23:15 UTC (Thu) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

> I think that something which could possibly work would be to limit both the depth and number of messages in a thread

I use a relative of this idea myself - once a thread has gone deep enough that replies are formatted a single word wide, I assume there's nothing worth the effort if reading them in that format :-D