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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

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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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.