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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3494 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 11, 2023

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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I know this goes against the spirit and practice of the motte, but is there a case for lowering the character limit in each comment to encourage brevity? Not to twitter levels or anything, maybe 5000 or so. I find myself writing long posts that people understandably skim. I find myself skimming other people's long posts. Oftentimes the meaning of a post can rely heavily on just a few words, words that people miss in a haystack full of other words.

People should feel free to essaypost (although if it’s more than 10,000 characters I think it should usually be a full post, not part of the CW thread), but I agree we could encourage slightly more brevity. I’ve tried recently to cut down my comments significantly before posting them.

I actually said the same thing when I first arrived. I've come to appreciate there's a variety of styles that suit the long form and I've been doing longer posts on average. I still think there could be more succinct posts though.

I’m a fan of summaries, bullet points, and bolded key conclusions

Goodness no.

Frequently I’ve gone over 5,000 characters even in posts that aren’t “essays”, or at least brushed against it. If anything the limit should be increased.

The long essayposts from people like @DaseindustriesLtd are part of why I keep coming back here. I like that this community is based around original long-form writing, in opposition to everywhere else on the internet that pushes people further and further towards brevity. I’m glad there’s at least one place where people are actually encouraged to share substantive reflections on an issue.

As I’ve said in other discussions on this issue in the past, it’s very rare for me to look at even poor writing and think “that could have been said in fewer words”. I just don’t think that people repeat themselves all that often, even when their thinking is confused or unoriginal. Typically each word and sentence will have some sort of purpose, even if only on a stylistic or formal level (or simply as a record of the writer’s thought process) - otherwise the person probably wouldn’t have written it. Even pure repetition can serve a purpose, like indicating emphasis. So in the majority of cases I don’t even understand what people are complaining about.

Edit- Ok I did actually think "he didn't have to use this many words" when I was reading Foucault's The Order of Things. But that's like, the only time I can remember thinking that in the past several years.

Incidentally I've been trying to practice the virtue of brevity on Twitter. Perhaps @RandomRanger will soon come to like local longform more.

Handle? Or is it a separate identity?

The problem is that the community grants status based on writing long, winding posts, obscure references and vocabulary geared more towards showing off intelligence than legibility or appropriateness for the audience/tone of the post. I'm skeptical that a top-down approach would change any of that.

Aim for concision and distilling your thesis into smallest and most airtight argument possible if you want to avoid overly long posts. Use bullet points. Independent clauses before dependent clauses. etc. Not to imply that you don't already do these things, but it's what I try to tell myself.

Disagree, I think the community naturally attracts people who want to write long and detailed posts. I was writing paragraphs upon paragraphs on random subreddits long before I found /r/ssc or /r/themotte.

I feel like that style is spot-on for appropriateness of the audience. I'd wager that over 70% of the people here are here because of their tolerance for reading long quirky substack articles during work hours.

It kind of goes against the culture of this place. The whole reason the community exists is because of SSC, which is know for having incredibly long posts. The length makes things more interesting, accurate, and entertaining.

In order to have meaningful discussion you often have to explain the models and assumptions about reality that lead to your main point.

If someone feels a post is too long and could be summarized, they could just respond to the original post with that feedback. Maybe the poster will incorporate that feedback and make shorter posts, or maybe it turns out the excess elaboration is necessary.

This place fills a niche where you can have long-from discussions on controversial issues and has rules that facilitate that purpose. There are other places to go if you want to have more succinct discussions. I don’t think this place should try to focus more on brevity just because that is what other places do. People come here because we aren’t like those other places.

Length is sometimes a problem but readability often goes down with length as well and in turn that becomes a bigger problem. More paragraphs, more linebreaks, breaking down lists that might be in paragraph form into a numbered/dots list with a new line for each item: sure we all write too much, except maybe the_nybbler, but sometimes the length is necessary and with that in mind I think things can be long without being unreadably long.

I'm not sure if a character limit is an ideal solution, but I think there would be meta benefits (for the reader, the writer, and the overall forum) if ONE post were about ONE thing.

Similar to the idea of a code smell, where its a sign of something going wrong somewhere if a function takes in too many arguments, I think its a sign of some kind of inequilibria of incentives or whatever if a post takes on too many topics. (This is ignoring blatant wordcount padding to justify the "Effort post")

My idea is that if the above could be "enforced" then the maximum number of things that could be discussed would be discussed. Given that it's not exactly uncommon for people to single out a specific part of a post.

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