I didn’t downvote it, but I had a temptation to. I think that temptation came from tone rather than content—as the original post talked about giving to charity as default option, and asked if you could do better, it felt like this post was ignoring the premise of the question (as opposed to saying something like “I don’t think the scale lets you beat giving to the best charities”).
Hey Owen, it’d be helpful to know for the future how I could improve the tone. I didn’t take myself as ignoring the premise of the question; it asked “If you acquired a large sum of money**, what would you do with it?” and mentioned donating it as one possible (boring) option. So I was saying that this option would be my answer (and thereby providing a comment which could be upvoted by people who agreed). Implicit in this is that I do indeed think that an increase in donation size of this order doesn’t let you beat the best charities—my understanding is that giving between $20,000 and $200,000 wouldn’t exhaust their room for more funding?
Yeah I thought about the implicit content and didn’t think there was any problem (which is why I didn’t downvote).
It’s always a little hard to pin down what rubs the wrong way about tone. But if I have a go, I guess I pick out two things:
not referring back to the fact that the suggestion you were making was kind of in the original post;
the second sentence sounds slightly patronising, in the context of a thread where all the suggestions are meant to be things the posters think could make a big difference.
Either of those on its own seems fine (if not ideal), but in combination it felt a bit patronising.
I didn’t downvote it, but I had a temptation to. I think that temptation came from tone rather than content—as the original post talked about giving to charity as default option, and asked if you could do better, it felt like this post was ignoring the premise of the question (as opposed to saying something like “I don’t think the scale lets you beat giving to the best charities”).
Hey Owen, it’d be helpful to know for the future how I could improve the tone. I didn’t take myself as ignoring the premise of the question; it asked “If you acquired a large sum of money**, what would you do with it?” and mentioned donating it as one possible (boring) option. So I was saying that this option would be my answer (and thereby providing a comment which could be upvoted by people who agreed). Implicit in this is that I do indeed think that an increase in donation size of this order doesn’t let you beat the best charities—my understanding is that giving between $20,000 and $200,000 wouldn’t exhaust their room for more funding?
Thanks for the feedback,
Tom
Yeah I thought about the implicit content and didn’t think there was any problem (which is why I didn’t downvote).
It’s always a little hard to pin down what rubs the wrong way about tone. But if I have a go, I guess I pick out two things:
not referring back to the fact that the suggestion you were making was kind of in the original post;
the second sentence sounds slightly patronising, in the context of a thread where all the suggestions are meant to be things the posters think could make a big difference.
Either of those on its own seems fine (if not ideal), but in combination it felt a bit patronising.
OK thanks, that’s helpful to know :)