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Notes -
When we were on reddit (and I was scraping every comment anyway) I thought about writing a script to rank posts based on value, and top on my list of useful signals was links, especially links to papers (any link that ends in pdf is probably good, links to arxiv or jstor are great, links to wikipedia are better than nothing (sometimes good, but often just thrown in for no reason).
What I hate is posts that claims controversial things, while the evidence they provide is just whatever feelings the author picked up via osmosis.
I've never really cared about the length of a post, so much as whether the author did anything to rise above the lowest possible level of scholarship, because scholarship is what determines value of a post. A one-sentence comment that drops a link to a paper that answers an interesting question contributes a lot more than 1000 words claiming that it really feels like your in-group is right.
This is one reason why I like when somebody posts about some topic they're passionate about. It's a way that the author can post a comment that, from my perspective, is well-researched, even if the author did absolutely no research for that explicit comment -- they've been woodworking or Mormon-ing or chess-playing for 10 years, and even if their post is valueless drivel to another woodworker/mormon/chess player, it might as well be a well-researched thesis for the right audience.
And where I'm going with this is that variety is good specifically for of this reason (and probably others). I don't really expect random Internet people to spend their free time reading peer-reviewed meta analyses for me, but "I live in Spain and here's is a mile-high overview of current politics that I received via osmosis" is grade-A content from my perspective. Even better is "I'm a researcher who studies X, and this is what I believe" because, again, even if no research went into that specific comment, you're getting decades of research behind it.
On the other hand, the marginal comment where somebody says "I like traditional values and cancel culture is bad" provides much less intellectual value here than it would most other places on the Internet.
(Tangentially... is there an API for this site? I've tried (e.g.) "https://www.themotte.org/comment" which seems like it ought to work based on the code but I get "Method Not Allowed")
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