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Alicorn comments on LessWrong Boo Vote (Stochastic Downvoting) - Less Wrong
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Is that bad?
Considering that some posts are getting hundreds of comments, not that many people have the time to read them all (especially if you have to search a bit to find what you have and haven't read), it may be better for everyone to have fewer comments, but of higher quality.
Or, to put it another way, considering that you're writing once to be read dozens of times, it's nice to your readers to take a bit of effort to polish up your prose, it costs a few seconds to you but can save a few seconds to a lot of people. This may feel unusual if we are used to situations like conversation (or online chat) where the listener/talker ratio isn't as skewed.
The real risk is when certain forms of comment (approval, disapproval) are discouraged, because the community's standards of "quality" are skewed.
It's not a matter of polished prose. I'm not paranoid because I think I might make a grammatical error or abuse semicolons. It's a matter of what ideas I commit to words and send out to the community. My thought process when I was debating whether to scrap my original comment was anxious and convoluted: "There aren't any other comments yet, do I really want this to set the tone for the entire discussion? This idea relies on the kind of personal anecdote that's gotten me poor results before. But it's still relevant, and I've been mistaken in the past about whether a comment would be well received..." At which point I decided that even if the original comment wasn't good enough, my internal agonizing probably was.