Good point. Hard to know -- there's plenty of people in this forum who are just fine with the way things are, politically that is.
Good point. Hard to know -- there's plenty of people in this forum who are just fine with the way things are, politically that is.
Personally I just click on people's usernames and skim a page or two of their comment history. I think the HN/web forum ethos of "a comment should stand on its own" has been a grave mistake, as it strips all the surrounding context from what someone is saying. The whole reason I can discuss contentious issues with my friends is that they know I am not a monster, but this luxury just doesn't exist in web forums.
So especially in these times, I think it's important that we do a little work to see where one another might coming from [assuming it's in good faith to begin with], rather than squandering our focus on destructive infighting from slight misunderstandings.
And as the old joke goes - How do you know if someone is a maggot? Don't worry, they'll tell you!
> I think the HN/web forum ethos of "a comment should stand on its own" has been a grave mistake, as this strips the surrounding context from what someone is saying.
I get what you mean about quoting something out of context, but I always read the intent of that guideline as the opposite: that a reply should quote enough of the original to provide the context. Really only needed near the top of long/deep threads where the reply might be multiple screens below the nested replies above it. Summarizing also works, which always risks misinterpretation, but it's also good to get that interpretation out in the open (again assuming good faith).
One thing I still can't stand reading is the usenet-era "point-for-point" style that interleaves a sentence or two of quote alternating with response, back and forth for the whole post. It's not only noisy, it tends toward a very snippy tone as well.
No, I wasn't talking about the context of the reply chain... but rather the context of everything else a commenter does/says/believes.
The comment in question - go read a few pages of the poster's comment history and you will understand it was meant as sarcasm. The difficulty is that sarcasm takes social capital to execute, and the comment-in-isolation model eschews even having that type of reputation.
Now in this case it would have been relatively easy to avoid sarcasm (although tiring, and I would say we're worse off for it). But the same difficulty applies to straightforward communication as well - if someone is criticizing the DNC, are they doing it from a place of trying to reform and make it better, or are they trying to drive cynicism and apathy? You don't know unless you know them.
And while you can mitigate the problem by writing comments that appeal to some groupthink (marking you as part of the tribe) before making a nuanced point against some other bit of groupthink, this propagates the first groupthink (which is itself often a problem) as well as bad-faith commenters being able to perform the same pattern.
Surely there must be someway to signal that a comment is sarcastic in an easily identifiable way? A code of some kind like a common signifier indicating an ending state that speaks directly to that cultural tribe along with a shorthand expression denoting irony?
Maybe something like "/s"?
The other option would be to embed enough context in a comment that most good faith readers would understand that you, the writer, are not so dense and uncultured that you don't know extremely common knowledge.
If only there was a method for identifying how common certain kinds of knowledge are!
Is there a similar tag for dismissing the bulk of a comment while narrowly responding to a single part of it? </s>
> The other option would be to embed enough context in a comment that most good faith readers would understand that you
I had described why this does not work in general.
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(PS the first paragraph was me introducing my new tag "<s>" which means sardonic)
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