Metablog

Addressed to the owner of Amygdala. In response to this comments thread.

If you want me to speculate about why you don’t have more commenters, Gary, I can. (And if you don’t, well, you can stop reading now.) You write very a lot of very long pieces. Many people don’t like to read blogs that have over a certain number of average words a day, because it takes too much time to keep up with it all. (Many of these people don’t read very fast.) You could consider splitting your blog into different blogs for different purposes. Political posts on one blog, sci fi and comics posts on another. Something like that. That way people won’t have to make the effort to skip posts they’re not interested in, (and believe me when I say that this has a huge effect—most people don’t have good filtering skills, and will stop reading a blog regularly sooner than skip uninteresting posts) because you’ll already have done that. You could consider cutting down on the word count. Editing posts down more, making them more pithy.

In many posts, you’re basically quoting other people. Quotes necessarily involve a switch in voice and style and context, and so reading them is much harder than reading a single voice throughout a post. The more quotes you include, the harder your posts are to read.

Your posts tend to be “expert” type posts. They show that you have a really large amount of knowledge about what you write about. They often require a certain amount of knowledge about those topics to understand and enjoy. People who don’t feel as knowledgable as they think you see yourself will almost never comment on this type of post. (If they think they know as much as you, but think that you think you know more, they won’t comment.) People who don’t want to make the mental effort to parse large numbers of details in order to understand your posts well enough to comment on them (even if they would be able to, and would have something to say) won’t do so. (This is the reason my blog doesn’t get many comments.)

Your writing isn’t very entertaining. A lot of it is just cursory comments on stuff that you’ve read. A lot of the value you provide is in linking to the stuff in the first place, and while that’s quite valuable, it’s not something that draws a big following, or a lot of comments. (In fact, I imagine more blog owners read you than do people who only comment, since you’re a good content filter to use for material for others.) But most of what people like in blogs is commentary—opinion, argumentation, conversation. Your writing lacks color, stylistic variety, metaphor, and narrative flow that engages the reader. (Yes, that is essential to good non-fiction.)

To the extent that people are drawn to blogs because of the owner’s persona, yours stinks. When you refer to your personal life, it’s always in a negative or apologetic way. This repels people. When you provide people insights into your life, they should always be calculated to endear people to you.

Oh, and you require registration for comments.

That probably covers most of it.

Should the manager of an online community be responsible to its commenters, or to its anonymous readers?

Say I put a blog post out, and someone comments (on my blog? hah!) politely and articulately with a question that I think is utterly trivial and silly. (Let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that my judgement accords with that of most readers, which it normally won’t reliably do.) Now, if I want to engage with the commenter, I have to respond to the comment, and enter into a conversation whose starting point is an inane question. This exchange could have value for the commenter, if they’re open-minded. Otherwise, they’re a troll. Let’s assume they’re openminded.

So, a polite, articulate, openminded, and ignorant or slightly stupid person asks a silly and trivial question. I can give that commenter value by answering it. But how much does reading that inane exchange cost my other readers? Is the total cost more than the value I give to that one commenter? Should I delete the comment, and save my other readers the trouble? What if the question is obvious and trivial, but not quite inane or silly?

It seems like the kind of people that usually go to hostile forums tend to have above average debate skills. Thus, they tend to form a low opinion of the debate skills (and thus general intelligence) of the other people in those forums, since those people will have average skills. Now, people tend to overlook logical fallacies supporting positions they already hold (which they can often justify using better reasoning), so they’ll also tend to overestimate the debate skills of people whose conclusions they share. Now, people who don’t go to hostile forums will tend to pick up a lot of their opinion of “the other side” from the people who do, because they don’t have any direct experience with the other side, but they do have exposure to the contrarians’ opinions of the other side.

Oh, look! Polarization! Insularity! Woah, where did that come from?

A lot of the time I feel like I should just reinvent everything, and fix all the problems with online forums at once. But that’s stupid and silly. The social evolutionary process that has led to our current generation of intellectual interaction software is much, much smarter than I am when it comes to figuring out what actually works. Now, I believe that natural selection hasn’t had a chance to operate on some forum features that would really make big improvements to the quality of discourse. And it may be that there really is no social demand for that kind of quality, and that many of my ideas that would otherwise work won’t end up working. But in order to take advantage of the critical mass of commenters necessary to really test out a new feature, I really have to be able to integrate it with accepted forms of content production. Things that actually do draw commenters, and bloggers. Otherwise it’s way too easy to miss the mark.

Another perk of incremental changes is that it becomes plausible to market the features to existing bloggers with existing communities, instead of having to displace all existing forms of blogging software.

And if I do this, feature by feature, eventually it’ll end up being very close to the ideal. That is, unless there are some strange barriers in the fitness landscape (not very likely, IMHO), i.e. some large upfront costs/risks to some features that would otherwise be sure things. Transition costs.

Being a meta blog as Metablog is, I want to start getting really meta. I know I was going to review truth mapping, but I feel really conflicted about that, and so I’m going to put it off.

In the meanwhile, I’ll introduce an idea really similar to truth mapping that I think could be a good way to handle the problem of comments threads just getting too damn long to read. The author of the post, as part of their authorly duties, integrates all the substantive comments into the main body of their post, as part of a sort of socratic dialogue. They don’t update the post itself as comments are coming in, but keep a copy in draft. Then, when comments have slowed down, they can post an updated version of the post with integrated comments. This can probably reduce the volume of words by 60% and still keep all the substance. It also has an advantage of making things much more clear to everyone, and of not violating commenters’ expectations enough to really discourage participation.

I imagine the integration would proceed by first directly modifying the post to incorporate criticsms and suggestions that the author agrees with. After that, there come criticisms that the author can empathize with, those being stated in their strongest forms as understood by the author. These might be a bit more distracting, so they could be formatting specially, using a special tag interpreted by the blogging software that would both indent, bullet, and hide the text inside the tag. Then to read it, you’d have to click on it to expand the text. Further, each of these little bullets could, optionally, have some explicit logical relationship to others, making it a “truth mapping” sort of approach.

Finally, this improved concoction could be posted “over” the old one, requiring special support from the blogging package, of course. You wouldn’t see the old one any longer, unless you clicked on a revision history link on the post. Most of the old comments would disappear as well. Finally, when the comments veer off in strange directions, they could be split off into new posts. If the author doesn’t really take an interest to a particular tangent, they can simply not moderate that new thread as much. Another blogger could even “take ownership” of the discussion, and comments could be transferred to the other blog where moderation and integration could proceed in the new venue.

There are some comments, however, that don’t really fit in to be integrated into the post, but the author might feel are worth keeping in the latest revision. So it might be necessary to mark each comment as “keep” or “leave”. Or perhaps it would be easier to simply mark certain comments for deletion when their contents are integrated into the main body of the post, and let other comments be assumed to be worth keeping.

All this sounds really labor intensive, doesn’t it? Well, it really is labor intensive. But I think there would be a lot of benefits. Posts would have a lot of reuse value. Instead of having to argue this or that point ad infinitum in some comment thread, one could instead simply link to the relevant parts of the post, or perhaps copy and paste. The results of that new discussion could contribute back to the old post. Futhermore, the bar to contributing to a really old post with a lot of comments would be a lot lower, because one wouldn’t have to read all the comments from old revisions, and so those old threads would stay alive and healthy longer. Plus, it gives more subtle and/or learned commenters more rewards for their efforts, and thus raises the quality of the blog’s commentariat.

This approach would require quite a bit of programming beyond what I’ve seen available in any system (except maybe Drupal), but I think its potential is large.

More than more explicit and formal approaches to debate modeling, I think this approach has the potential to catch on in the wider blogosphere, at least at the more serious sites. And it will give us the kind of experience and intuition and ideas we need to really know what we would want out of a more explicit system. So it’s a good first step.

Taking positions that go against the general grain of a certain ideology that you believe in for the most part, and then presenting those positions to those who share most of your views, but without having established yourself as a trustworthy member of that ideological community, is a recipe for being misunderstood.

No big surprise there. But it is frustrating, sometimes. I never feel like reading conservative blogs, or anti-feminist blogs, or anti-singularity blogs, for instance. I only like reading blogs that I agree with 80+% of the time. That way, when I argue over the remaining 20%, it’s engaging and constructive. Incidentally, I think that if one wants to expand the ideological spectrum of one’s blogroll, the thing to do isn’t to change the percentage, but to look for discussion at a higher level. I could talk to a conservative about secular moral philosophy, for instance, even if discussions about abortion would be entirely fruitless. Because at the higher levels, eventually you reach logical principles and/or universally common experiences, which will eventually reach 80% agreement.

The downside of all this is that it’s easy to be perceived as not being as friendly and understanding as you really are to the positions that you’re criticising, because people assume that you’re criticizing more than you actually are. They assume that you’re one of “the other” instead of someone with minor differences in opinion. It’s especially hard to be the kind of person that thinks a lot about meta issues, like me, and therefore doesn’t have much to say on the substance of many articles, even if one enjoys them a lot, but instead prefers to point out logical errors in arguments that can probably stand anyway, or on other legs. Pointing out those errors is seen as a hostile action.

I think it boils down to this. It’s really easy to attribute positions commonly held by group A to an individual commenter who appears to resemble group A, even when the commenter really avoids saying anything that explicitly identifies them as being in group A. Part of this is justified, of course. If one is unaware of how a person could reconcile their A-style belief with their wider ideology of B, how their A-style belief could really be consistent with B, then one is justified in identifying the person as a member of group A. But one shouldn’t put much stock in this identification, and this is where I think many people fall short. They cling to that preliminary identification. If the person tries to identify themselves more with B, others will suspect dishonesty. And it’s possible for a commenter to avoid this, to some degree, with careful phrasing and proper ordering and good framing.

This general tendency to confuse a person with a wider group manifests in other ways, too. I see very often where liberals will denigrate conservatives because of some supposed hypocricy in, e.g. being pro-life yet anti-gun-control. But it’s a mistake to accuse a group of people of hypocricy unless the hypocritical actions have been observed together in enough individual members of the group to know that those members are representative of the group.

In particular, it’s patently unfair to take two separate groups of people (say, moral values conservatives versus big business consevatives) with two different behaviors that, in a single person, would be hypocritical, and combine those two groups (say, conservatives), and call that single group hypocritical. For example, it’s a fallacy to say that anti-feminists are hypocritical in argumentation because they’re either saying you’re too shrill or saying you’re getting too technical. Because it’s likely that the group of people that would say the first has a small overlap with the group of people that would say the second, even if both are contained within the larger group of anti-feminists.

This fallacy happens because of the homogenizing effects of intellectual tribalism on the other side. It becomes easier to merge and conflate separate and disparate instances of an opposing viewpoint, perceiving them as being concomitant in individual representatives of the other viewpoint.

Case in point (although this is one of millions): is this comment.

I haven’t been posting because a wave of apathy has overtaken me. My life feels meaningless and empty nowadays. The only bright spot has been hanging out with a certain new friend of mine, but even that doesn’t consistently keep me up (since she’s a pretty busy person). I could probably figure out how to change my brain either through cognitive therapy or medication (for ADD, probably) to get rid of this feeling, but that raises issues of the continuity of personal identity through change that make me feel all squicky.

So maybe if I try to start posting again it’ll help me some. I have like a million drafts, but everything I’ve written sounds so naive and unpolished, and it’s on such heavy material that I feel incredibly unqualified to post it. Maybe I should just say to hell with it and click “publish” after an hour of revision, no matter what the state at that point, and let the magic of the internets point out the error in my ways. It’s a thought.

It’s a bit of an unfortunate aspect of blog commenting that to really participate in a good discussion, a few conditions have to apply, and those can make it hard to participate as much as one might like and still lead a balanced life. For instance, most large blogs on my list have a ratio of good, substantial, thought-provoking comments to vapid, insipid, incomprehensible, flaming, or otherwise undesirable comments of around 1:3. That’s average. Less than about 1:8, I can’t really stand ever going through the comments. (In fact, those blogs tend to have main content that I don’t enjoy as much either, but whatever.) But the blogs with higher ratios also tend to be those with fewer readers, and discussion sort of just ekes along slowly there, since there’s not enough input to keep it going. There aren’t enough readers for there to be any dedicated readers.

And sometimes, even if the ratio is OK, the pace of discussion is just too fast. Commenters that have more time than you to dedicate to commenting come to dominate. This is a natural outcome of the dynamics of commenting. The more prolific commenters have a higher tolerance for long comments threads than the average commenter, so the more commenters you have, the higher percentage of your commenters will be the prolific, dedicated type.

So, if you want to participate at all, you have to both ignore all the comments you don’t really care about dealing with* and also take the time to read and sometimes respond to a sometimes large number of other comments. It’s quite a tiring prospect.

* And that takes as much effort as dealing with spam does, at least–except that blogs don’t have bayesian filters on their comments threads, unless you use an RSS reader with that feature and the blog you read supports comments.