It seems to me like this post got a reasonable amount of feedback
That was kind of my point. I interpreted you before as saying you wanted to see fewer posts like this, and was pointing out that if we did, those posts wouldn’t get feedback like this. (That said, I think that the feedback on this could have been better, I’m responsible for this too)
Do any counterexamples come to mind?
I think going through this would take a lot of time, especially if you really don’t share this intuition. Happy to discuss in a call. I would note that “lots of critical comments” doesn’t exactly mean that “what’s going on” is obvious. There are many mediocre posts that have bad ideas that get no comments. I would expect that if one had a post that got a ton of bad comments, they would assume it could be because their post was much worse than those that got few comments, or that people dislike them personally.
I also think that feedback on the Forum tends to be more helpful (on average) than you’d get on almost any other free online platform. My main criticism of the Forum’s commentariat is that they don’t write enough comments (I’d love to see people get more feedback), but I don’t know what alternative platform would be better in that regard.
I wouldn’t really disagree, but expect that we can still aim for much better. Many of the forums I encounter (especially ones that border on discussions of Morality) are really really bad.
A question: Do you think the Forum would be a better site, overall, if it had only upvotes and comments, but no downvotes?
I’m not excited about this idea. The upvote/downvote system is crude enough as it is; if anything, I’d like to see more specificity come to it (like, I upvote the reasoning of this post, but not its conclusions). I am excited about things like important community members (myself included) learning how to better handle emotionally sensitive communication, though there are many useless ways of attempting this. Eventually, it could be interesting to have ML bots or similar to help here.
That was kind of my point. I interpreted you before as saying you wanted to see fewer posts like this, and was pointing out that if we did, those posts wouldn’t get feedback like this. (That said, I think that the feedback on this could have been better, I’m responsible for this too)
I think going through this would take a lot of time, especially if you really don’t share this intuition. Happy to discuss in a call. I would note that “lots of critical comments” doesn’t exactly mean that “what’s going on” is obvious. There are many mediocre posts that have bad ideas that get no comments. I would expect that if one had a post that got a ton of bad comments, they would assume it could be because their post was much worse than those that got few comments, or that people dislike them personally.
I wouldn’t really disagree, but expect that we can still aim for much better. Many of the forums I encounter (especially ones that border on discussions of Morality) are really really bad.
I’m not excited about this idea. The upvote/downvote system is crude enough as it is; if anything, I’d like to see more specificity come to it (like, I upvote the reasoning of this post, but not its conclusions). I am excited about things like important community members (myself included) learning how to better handle emotionally sensitive communication, though there are many useless ways of attempting this. Eventually, it could be interesting to have ML bots or similar to help here.