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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3741 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 27, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How do you (personal or impersonal, your choice) find the time and energy to ever add to discussions, here or elsewhere? I enjoy reading other peoples posts here and seeing the discussions that form. I could read for hours. But I find it hard to sit down and write out my thoughts on anything just because of how long it takes. I want to pay my debts to the community in the local currency, but it's just so draining to write anything more than one or two sentence replies (which is probably why I'm more lively in real time conversations). Reading and lurking just feel like an infinitely more productive use of my time, even for topics I claim to be passionate about.

Is it just a matter of exercising my writers-muscles? Is it my method of commenting, is there some more efficient way to comment? Do other people put hours into posts with any amount of substance? How do I avoid the feeling that my time on any corner of the internet is pissing into an ocean? Is most everything on here peoples' first edit? (I find myself going back and forth, writing and re-writing a lot of what I have to say). Maybe participating just isn't made for me.

This is generally a question of "Why is commenting so hard and how do I stop lurking?".

(This comment took somewhere between thirty and forty minutes to make as a point of comparison. I have no idea if that is a lot or a little. It feels like it is so much more than it should be).

You should consider if writing long chunks of text is actually paying your debt to the community. People waste a lot of volume here speculating (in detail) about things that could be pruned to 1 paragraph if they just looked things up, or tried to ground their idea with a fact that could quickly "sanity check" it.

I lurked themotte for a long time. One day, not too long ago, I decided I want to get more serious about participating. I can think of a few pull factors that motivated me:

  • I have something valuable to share, either because of my unique perspective/experience or because I've picked up something that not many do.

  • I'm curious to be proven wrong. It's happened at least twice that I got feedback that shook me on a deep level because I realized that I overestimated my understanding of a topic.

On the technical side, some answers to your questions:

  • I've grown to like writing, so each post or comment that I write is a little fun exercise.

  • Some posts of mine were first drafts while others took a week or two to draft and redraft until I was satisfied with the level of clarity.

    • This was a major hangup of mine in the beginning. I was nervous about how people would perceive my writing. It turned out that most are curious and I feel like every time I post is a chance to get sucked into a scintillating discussion. This realization really helped alleviate part of my perfectionism and bring my perception more in line with reality--in other words, I worry less and post more.

    • The times when I post the first draft, I've usually turned the idea around in my head for a while or talked it through with friends. The times I need more drafts are usually because the idea is vague and I don't know how to structure before transmitting it in words.

  • The quality of comments my writing gets here is astounding. I do not feel like I'm yelling into the void.

(This comment took somewhere between thirty and forty minutes to make as a point of comparison. I have no idea if that is a lot or a little. It feels like it is so much more than it should be).

There's a lot to unpack here probably, if you're willing to bear the discomfort.

I'm not as active as I used to be, given the additional friction from having the Motte move off Reddit, and IRL engagements. That said, when I do write, it's because-

  1. I feel like I have something interesting to say

  2. I have domain expertise regarding something someone else said, for example I might chip in with medical advice once in a while.

  3. I'm proctrasturbating instead of doing something more important (ding ding!)

Roughly in diminishing order of frequency.

While writing a comment worthy of being dissected here is a task and a half, I take pride in my writing, and the idea of an unusually astute audience reading it is always a bonus!

Frankly speaking, unless you're making a gigantic essay on a topic needing citations and framing, just let it rip.

Or wait till some, gasp, is being wrong on the internet, that usually gets the writing juices flowing ;)

Don't worry, it's not just you. I'm finishing up some graphs for a big post, and it definitely feels like pissing away time for no real benefit.

Beats playing video games though.

Do other people put hours into posts with any amount of substance? Is most everything on here peoples' first edit?

Just to answer the direct question, most posts I personally write that are shorter than say, two paragraphs get minimal rereads. I post in a kind of edited stream of consciousness, one sentence at a time that I pick apart words and structure to keep it flowing from the previous sentence and prepare for the following sentence. I pick some portion of a post that I'd like to address, respond to or critique and then state up front the point/objection/tangent and just keep writing until I think I've made the point. And then I hit go.

Longer posts and posts with larger scopes need much more forethought but for little responses to direction questions it doesn't take much. It's kind of like hacking together something to get the job done rather than formally engineering it. Most posts are fine living in the housing equivalent of a shack you built from garbage on hand. Others can't possibly be accommodated by anything less than four star treatment.

It is no different for me than talking.

I rarely make "effort posts" in that the posts take effort. They are often long but always effortless. Ideas come into my head, I blurt them out into the keyboard. Then arrange them around and press 'Comment'. Most of the comments I make take me no more than 3-4 minutes to write. You shouldn't be writing at your speed limit, write at 70% and maintain that for long enough that your 70% of the future is your >70% of today.

You are probably overthinking it. It doesn't need to be perfect. Just put it out there and see what happens for now.

I personally tend not to comment unless there is a topic I'm passionate about , I've encountered a 'someone is wrong on the internet' issue, or a topic comes up that I feel uniquely able to address.

So if there is a topic you are passionate about or something you think you have unique knowledge about, then write! Make getting down your exact thoughts on a topic its own satisfaction. Take pleasure in manipulating the rhetoric to try and hit just the right note for what you're going for. Focus on the act of writing itself as whats enjoyable.

Bonus points if at any point you edit your comment to be more in line with the sentiment of charity and exactness. Shoot for that Actually A Quality Contribution Ribbon! Or, alternatively, make it clear to yourself that you just have a simple comment or idea and stop yourself from overthinking about the issue. Easier said than done, but I think either approach is reasonable.

And keep in mind that a lot of comments here are Pareto's of Pareto's. Once the blur of names start to become more clear you'll notice the same names over and over. These are people who are extremely comfortable with posting. By the mere fact of post regularly they are unusual people. So your case is likely far more normal.

I cut back on the amount of time I spend arguing here because I noticed I wasted hours writing and constantly refreshing the page. And sometimes, while reading, I get sucked into this spiral of trying to parse vague comments together to figure out what each poster is arguing. It's almost involuntary and is sort of unpleasant, but if I don't piece it together I will spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about it trying to figure it out. When I do comment now, I try to make it a little closer to stream of consciousness, and when I read I try to avoid comment threads that don't have arguments I am interested in, which greatly cuts down on writing and reading time. But sometimes that means the arguments are poorly composed and my points are not as strong as they should be. I suspect practice, more than anything, would help write argumentative comments faster.

Sometimes the time feels like nothing, there's little or no cost to writing on something I care about. I definitely put many hours into substantial posts on the old site.

“it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to talk and remove all doubt.” -- Mark Twain

I can't stop myself from commenting on anything. Sometimes I've signed up for forums/subreddits specifically to lurk, and I still can't stop commenting. Maybe it's arrogance, most of my posts are shit. Sometimes after all the objections come in I don't even agree with them anymore.

There's an old story I remember being told in Fed Courts class about a judge who kept trying to write his decision one way, found that as hard as he tried he just couldn't write it, and realized he should reverse his decision and write it the other way and found it flowed right out of him. When you believe in what you're writing, or at least when you enjoy what you're writing, it will happen on its own. What do I/we/theMotte/theMedia/theWorld get wrong that you know about that makes you mad? Ok, now work outward from there.

I comment very sporadically for this reason — effortposting takes too much time and, well, effort! Even when I do comment, it's usually just a brief thought. The Motte is an entertainment + procrastination venue for me, and my substantive effort is reserved for things like my actual job or personal creative projects. I do try to contribute by promoting the community elsewhere on occasion.

Is it just a matter of exercising my writers-muscles?

In general yes, the way to get better at anything is to practice. I work as a writer and I've gotten a lot faster over the years (though I'm still not particularly fast, nor prolific, in the overall distribution of writers).

Is it my method of commenting, is there some more efficient way to comment? Do other people put hours into posts with any amount of substance? [...] Is most everything on here peoples' first edit?

It varies. Some people are indeed investing hours into their posts and going through multiple rounds of edits. Others have the enviable combination of logorrhea and natural eloquence.

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