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Should we have a 'should be longer' and 'should be shorter' upvote/downvote button?
A good few reported comments make a point but I believe the real problem with them is that they don't substantiate their claims or elaborate. They can't, nobody can in only a few sentences.
Alternately, there are some top-level and mid-level posts that are so long my eyes just glaze over and I scroll onwards. I'm wary of doing that myself and try to prune things down. That comes at the cost of detail, I sometimes end up letting considerable weight rest on single word qualifiers I add where perhaps sentences are needed. Scylla and Charybdis. I don't know how hard length-voting would be or if anyone else cares. Opinions?
No. There are practically infinite number of metrics a comment can be voted on.
This particular metric should be discussed in a reply. "You should elaborate more on....", "You could have said X with much less words for e.g Y".
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A hack to get in the ballpark would be a simple comment reply, like: “Love this post. Question: can you make it longer?”
And then analyzing upvotes on your comment vs the original.
It’s a low precision test on average, but would be sensitive to extremes. I know I wouldn’t be able to ignore a highly-upvoted response asking me to go into further detail.
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Keeping in mind that this is probably a hypothetical anyway because I doubt anyone will go to the effort of adding the feature, I'm gonna go with "hard no".
First, there's something psychologically appealing about having a single unified measure of a comment's quality. I'm already not a huge fan of how LW has two comment scores, one for general quality and one for agree/disagree. I like the idea of not letting people "hedge their bets" - it's either a good comment or it's not, regardless of how the specific component vectors of the quality score break down. If there's a very well written comment that argues for a view that you find repugnant, then I think you should have to take an up/down stance on the comment and live with your choice.
Regarding the longer/shorter vote button specifically - we already have an official rule against low effort posting. So a "should be longer" button would be somewhat superfluous. If the comment is a problem, then a mod will give you a warning for low effort posting. That's the "should be longer" button.
I know that a lot of people would appreciate a "should be shorter" button because the length of posts on this site has been a source of constant complaints, but as I've argued repeatedly whenever this topic comes up, I really value the fact that TheMotte is one of the few public discussion forums on the internet that encourages long-form posting, and I want to keep it that way. Some of my all time favorite posts on the site, posts that really stood out to me as just being fantastic pieces of writing, are quite long. So I'm fine with people just going crazy with it. Not every long post is good of course - sometimes the writing is just bad, sometimes it's on a topic that you have no interest in, etc. But then you can just downvote, ignore, and/or collapse the thread.
I get frustrated whenever people trot out that "if only I had more time I could have made this letter shorter" line. It's diametrically opposed to my own aesthetics. I want to cultivate this site as a space for people who actually enjoy reading and writing, because there are very few spaces that serve that purpose.
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