Occasionally a post will come along that generates a lot of discussion in the comments section. Oftentimes, when the number of comments on such posts get to be very large, I feel too intimidated to try to sift through the comments to look for good points: I may look through the most upvoted original comments for points that seem interesting, but if there are large comment chains/nests (which can prevent highly upvoted comments from floating to the top of the comment section), I feel deterred from digging into the comments to find any key insights/quotes. (This is especially the case when I am a few days late to the conversation, and thus am less incentivized/likely to contribute.)
Thus, I am curious whether people would like to see “curation comments” or “meta-comments” that provide a list of key points or “Thoughts I found most interesting/insightful from the comment section” after a post has been out for a few days. Of course, I do not expect any such summary to be perfect or objective, but I personally would probably appreciate being able to see 1–3 summaries from people rather than trying to wade through all of the comments myself.
I am mainly just asking to see if people share my interest in this idea, rather than offering a specific proposal. However, one simple way I figure this could be done is if people agreed upon using a standardized, ctrl+f’able phrase like “[Comment Curation]” or “[Meta-Comment]” at the beginning of any such comment.
Thoughts? Interest?
This sounds great!
Creating a summary is costly and difficult to do well. So, when someone creates a good one, upvote it a lot or something.
I feel like giving your response more weight seeing how you’ve made over 420 comments!
I would be interested. Consider making it a new post instead.
I’m not strictly opposed to it being a new post, but my concern is that, given that I would like to have multiple comments-summary comments to choose from, you might see a proliferation of such posts which take up space on the front page. (Also, it might be more convenient to have such comments on the target post itself.)
Perhaps, though there could be a norm of “graduating” meta-comments if 1) they receive enough likes, and 2) the number of comments covered is very large (e.g., >100).
Alternatively, I suppose there could be an in-built feature where users can hide comment summary posts on the frontpage, although this would require changing the site, so it would probably be better to avoid this until people actually start to use the idea more?
That sounds cool, though I think it’s a bit too optimistic.
But I basically agree with the rest.