Oh wow, I’d read about this discussion, but hadn’t seen it before. Very interesting.
I see this site has avoided most of points a, b, and c. And in fact, the software toned those down a lot, too, even in sites that make a lot of use of them. For instance, I see the “like button” (it’s disabled on this site, but used on two others I post on) used more as a “thanks for posting this” note than for anything like ranking or finding “good” posts or whatever.
Hey – he listened. The software actually DOES kinda do that. It pokes users if they dominate a thread, for instance.
Note that this feature exists, but is… for some inexplicable reason… disabled on this forum. Normally you have a “summarize” button docked at the bottom of longer topics:
This will collapse the topic into the 10% “best” posts (capped at 100), as measured by likes, replies, bookmarks, read time, etcetera.
Not referring to the likes, but the summarization feature. They are related, but not intimately. The Cliff’s Notes version of a topic can be quite handy.
I’d love to see “Estimated Read Time” on some of our more verbose threads where each post probably took the better part of an evening to compose, or the 10K threads.
Yes, the software assumes that if posters A, B, and C ask three questions that have complex answers, and poster D gives the complex answers to all three questions, which take considerable length to answer, then poster D is dominating the thread and is told to shut up.
The software encourages short and necessarily superficial answers to complex questions. Bad fit for GQ.
And given the linear nature of most discussions, I doubt the summarize feature works especially well. I can see it being helpful in a longish thread that starts with a question and has some answers that were upvoted. But having turned off the “upvoting” feature, I doubt that just going by how long a post was open in someone’s browser or how many times it was quoted will be reliable enough to be useful.
Hmmm. I’ve seen it complain when one poster types a lot of posts in a row, and when two posters go back and forth for a while. I don’t think I have seen it complain about a single long post. Maybe we should look into getting that feature turned off. That IS a bad fit for this board.
No, not a single long post. It keeps track of total share a poster makes to a thread, and if that share is more than a certain amount, it tells the poster to shut up.
It’s happened to me a couple of times now, when there have been questions asked about complex issues and I’ve done my best to give a good answer.
Discourse discourages discourse on complex matters.
We’ve liked other features that we didn’t expect to. Perhaps if we ever get an admin again we could turn it on for a trial run. At any rate, it sounds like something you can just ignore if it’s not useful.
Not exactly; the idea is that you’d write one post replying to posters A, B and C with relevant quotes, like so
User A said this
response to user A
User B said this
response to user B
User C said this
response to user C
Discourse discourages excess metadata in the discussion (theory being write once, read many – favor the reader) through replying 10 times sequentially when you could have written one post with 10 quotes, or two posts with 5 quotes. Discourse does not, in any form whatsoever, discourage long posts.*
(Though it is possible to dominate a discussion by replying with a novella to every single other person who replies. I’ve seen this happen, most notably in my personal memory with Trump fans circa 2017. Presumably these retired people with a lot of time on their hands… it’s kind of a war of disproportionate response and it is extremely un fun, depressing, even. But it is also lot of work so you don’t tend to see it that much in the wild.)
* well, there is a an absolute character limit for individual posts, but you’d have to write a whole lot to hit it… let me look it up… it’s 32000 characters by default. Not sure what it is here.
One thing that would be beneficial on a board like this is the ability to selectively throttle down the number of posts a problematic user can make. The mechanism which pops up a message if they post a lot to a thread seems like it could work to ensure domineering users can’t dominate every thread. Some users can dominate threads with posts that are really more distracting than discussion (sometimes known as “sealioning”). Rather than banning those users, it seems like the problem could be managed by limiting how often they could post. Limits could be set like X posts per day in a thread and Y posts per day total. I don’t think there should be a limit for everyone, but rather it should be something that the mods can do as an alternative to banning a user who is generating a lot of flags.
@codinghorror , I believe that @Northern_Piper got a nastygram from discourse when he had posted one post to a thread. His was the second post and answered the question in the first post with some cites.
Does that sound like something you think ought to happen? What would trigger that?
I’ve now tried this on several threads in two other fora. It cuts down long threads to something up to 100 posts, with “n posts hidden” interspersed between the posts it shows. The posts it showed didn’t see especially noteworthy to me, and it was hard to follow the thread. They do tend to be longer-than-average posts, so what it shows is actually something hard to read through. I don’t feel we are missing very much by not having the feature, although since it’s just an option, it seems completely harmless to have it.
Yes, this feature definitely exists and new users are sandboxed in a variety of ways. There’s also an entirely different set of limits that apply to all accounts less than 24 hours old. More at
@Northern_Piper I’ll see if we can tone down the message, because it definitely doesn’t say “shut up” … but I’ve heard the criticism before. Softer language might assist.
