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Please read the paper before you comment

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Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#21

Post by andykx »

fouc wrote: post #19

> I have about as much ignorance of these domains as all the people mocking the paper on Twitter. But there’s one big difference between me and them: I actually read the paper. All of this information is on the first page. Even if you don’t know about sci-hub, you could still read the abstract and check out the researcher bios! Nobody read the paper before dunking on it. Nobody read the abstract either. About half th…

Without wishing to downplay the fact that this is a major issue, it’s hard to read scientific literature from a field you haven’t previously studied. Layman summaries are a great way to get a sense of what the paper is actually saying, though summaries made by random commenters are unreliable.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#22

Post by GavinMcG »

baddox wrote: post #6

> Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more corrupted everything gets. The article is good. The press release is bad. The tweet about the press release is worse. The tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release are terrible. Each one loses more of the critical context we need to actually understand what’s going on. Only the paper itself is a primary source. If you want to know…

It's about discourse, not the paper, so it would likely tell you to read the paper.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#23

Post by alextheparrot »

baddox wrote: post #6

> Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more corrupted everything gets. The article is good. The press release is bad. The tweet about the press release is worse. The tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release are terrible. Each one loses more of the critical context we need to actually understand what’s going on. Only the paper itself is a primary source. If you want to know…

I know this isn’t a serious comment, but given he actually read the paper the shortest path from the paper to the author isn’t through that route

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#26

Post by prawn »

serf wrote: post #11
sircastor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you’d get an increase in quality at a loss of quantity. As you suggest, that may be the key to the discourse we’re all looking for.

you lose a bit of quality, too. It might up the ratio towards quality, but you'll definitely lose some comments that the author doesn't feel like jumping through hoops to send through. example : captcha/captcha-like services. I've written well-thought out responses and comments on various forums and communities , and finally when asked to identify all the buses or traffic lights I quit the process. Why? Is it because…

I already abort a lot of comments I've written to post on forums, Reddit, HN, etc. Sometimes multiple paragraphs of written and re-written text. Usually my thinking is "someone will inevitably misconstrue my intent and start a dispute" - the chance of that often seems higher than the chance of someone finding my comment useful. So, I figure "what's the point?"

Adding a gateway, like your example with the CAPTCHA, would only reduce that chance of my posting further.

But as you indicated, it is a small barrier to a motivated, angry, agenda/conspiracy-fueled commenter.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#27

Post by jldugger »

zzo38computer wrote: post #20
jhardy54 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been considering doing something similar, except with plain CSS: a.paper ~ a.comments { display: none; } a.paper:visited ~ a.comments { display: inline; }

Some users (including myself) disable the :visited command.

Sometimes we must all make sacrifices for the greater good.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#28

Post by hardwaregeek »

I've thought about this with respect to sources. I was reading a book which mentioned Emile Durkheim's work. I have never read any Durkheim. I cannot speak to Durkheim's points nor whether the author accurately represented them. What's even worse is that if I did read Durkheim, he'd probably discuss someone before him. And I wouldn't know if he accurately represented that person's points. I'm not sure if the author who referenced Durkheim has read the people who Durkheim cites^[1], so I'm not sure if they know either. We have this game of telephone where we all cite these sources and people rarely, if ever check. And this is in academic literature where publishing happens pretty slowly! In Twitter it's easy to reach a source chain of 5-6 deep in days, let alone months.

[1]: They probably have but I can't say.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#29

Post by PragmaticPulp »

The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes.

In my feed, the highest signal to noise ratio comes from people who aren't commenting on any and every trending topic. Instead, they're busy doing real work, away from Twitter, only occasionally checking in to share something. Likewise, that's how I try to structure my own engagement.

When people have 50 Tweets per day or more, it's unlikely that they're taking time to really think and engage. It's more about rapid fire comments designed to get the most engagement.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#30

Post by aeternum »

renewiltord wrote: post #14

I used to be upset about this. But now I just use a chrome extension to ban people who have clearly not read the article. It just kills any comment thread they start. My HN is much more useful now. My Twitter is fine because I only follow people who don't do this.

This does not seem possible technically unless you own facebook's ad network.
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