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Please read the paper before you comment

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Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#141

Post by tomaszdiesel »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #134
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #29

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…

You mean Ben Shapiro didn't actually have to make his tweet about how his sex life sucks and his wife had gone on a two month getaway with her personal trainer? :o I never "got" Twitter, it's a rapid fire barrage of random remarks and unless you spend a lot of recurring time on it you won't be able to follow what's going on. In my opinion anyway, my GF is really into it.

if i may share my personal experience with twitter: like any social media platform, it might be beneficial to actively avoid content that the platform is known for i.e. mainstream content.

i'm on twitter because i think there are some pretty funny people on there. so i only follow people i think are funny, and i actively block any type of content at first sight that kind of annoy me. worked out pretty well for me so far.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#142

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Good luck with that.

For the record, I did read the article, but my life is not significantly richer (or poorer) for having done so.

A classic technique for reading scientific papers, is to read the abstract, then the conclusion. If they motivate us to read the rest, then we do so.

What I often do here, is first check the comments, and see if I want to go and read the OP. If I do that, I’ll generally read it all; unless it’s really painful.

As a prolix author[0] (and commenter[1]), I’m fairly familiar with low reader engagement, and I’ve learned to do good abstracts/intro sentences that hook the reader.

I’ve also learned not to lose too much sleep over whether or not people read my stuff (spoiler: they don’t).

I write for my own satisfaction. It would be nice if others enjoyed it, but I won’t live or die by the opinions of others.

Don’t get me wrong; I do care what others think of me, but it isn’t a principal driver of my life.

I have great respect for good tech writers. The world needs more of them.

A lot of what I write is basic information. It needs to be complete, clear and concise; not great literature. A simple ToC is useful in these cases, and good information architecture is important.

If I really want others to read my stuff, it’s incumbent upon me to write short, brutally-edited, articles, with clear, succinct, paragraphs, “hooky” abstracts, and conclusions that encourage people to go back, and read what they missed.

Basically, my experience is that it’s my job to write stuff in a way that encourages reader engagement, and to lead them to the important components of the document.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ChrisMarshallNY

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#144

Post by ImaCake »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #29

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…

I dislike twitter. But do like digital painting artworks. My solution is an RSS feed of a bunch of twitter digital artists. Means I have no contact with twitter itself, but I do get exactly the content I want.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#145

Post by afarrell »

afarrell wrote: post #96
ekianjo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article This is natural if you follow the amount of effort required. Effort to comment ~ close to zero. Effort to go through an article worth several pages (or worse, a paper!) without dropping off is much, much higher.

Thats because an awful lot of people are chewing ice. (epistemic status: I am 100% projecting here. Maybe I'm broadly right though) A person with an iron deficiency, will often have an urge to chew ice [1]. Ice does not have iron or help you absorb iron -- but brains are weird. There are an awful lot of people who are lonely and want the sort of emotional and intellectual connection that they'd normally get comes fro…

For the curious I am in column A, occasionally column D, and very recently column C along with much of humanity.

And yes, I am claiming that a lot of feminist twitter is in column B. They themselves have been quite explicit about that.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#146

Post by gmac »

cm2187 wrote: post #133
cgrealy wrote: post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

Hence the way journalists love to misinform people: a headline and first paragraph that pushes their bias and narrative, while the facts that completely mitigate if not contradict the start of the article are buried somewhere in the middle. How to lie without lying, better than a legal footnote.

This is exactly what I’ve noticed lately. Is it a known/named phenomenon? Do you have a reference?

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#147

Post by sobani »

neiman wrote: post #126
cgrealy wrote: post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

To be fair, I'd make it a point to comment and not mention bananas if I saw such a request. Why? don't look for reason while analyzing the behaviour of the average internet user:-)

I guess that would make you one of the 4% to whom the lizardman's constant applies.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#148

Post by Scarblac »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #132
Max-q wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NRK Beta, the tech lab of the Norwegian broadcasting corporation, make you take a quiz about the article before you are allowed to comment. I really like that idea.

Yeah I heard about that one I think, that's really clever. Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool on the best days, but comment sections under news articles? It makes all the undereducated conspiracists come out the woodworks. A Dutch news site (nu.nl) tried to run a comment section and even something of a social network for a while, but they couldn't maintain them. You can create a comment section,…

Nu.nl's comment section has been back for a while, they dumped the social network ambitions and invested in better moderation before turning it back on. It's helped somewhat.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#149

Post by chrisseaton »

rendall wrote: post #119

Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so I looked into it. The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated…

Lesson is don’t joke or use sarcasm or hyperbole on the internet because you are begging to be maliciously misunderstood.
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