I wonder if the value of a post is not correlated with upvotes. i.e. a post that is 1.3* more valuable than another might have to be 100 words longer but only get 10% more upvotes.
I feel like even if we could encourage only the posts who are below 500 characters that seem to have downvotes to consider increasing their length in order to roughly correlate with sharing more words = being clearer = providing more value. Even at the worst effects of the results of such a strategy, we would probably see the garden get a little nicer.
And continuing the metaphor, its not like we are chopping down trees, just clearing out a few weed around the roses.
I propose a character count on the comment boxes so that people know how many characters they are writing, then possibly a popup (similar to the one about comments on downvoted posts), that says,
"we noticed that comments are more meaningful, helpful and thought out when they are at a minimum 500 characters, you can still post a shorter comment but you have N characters to go to cross the arbitrary threshold we decided on. You can still post but it will cost -1 karma. If you think that you will get at least one upvote more than usual then its certainly worthwhile posting as is; otherwise can you add more useful characters to your post?"
[pollid:1011]
"we noticed that comments are more meaningful, helpful and thought out when they are at a minimum 500 characters, you can still post a shorter comment but you have N characters to go to cross the arbitrary threshold we decided on. You can still post but it will cost -1 karma. If you think that you will get at least one upvote more than usual then its certainly worthwhile posting as is; otherwise can you add more useful characters to your post?"
I can tell you exactly what the outcome of that will be. I am sure you'll figure it out, too, if you think about your suggestion for a minute or two.
A few months ago we have launched an experimental website. In brief, our goal is to create a platform where unrestricted freedom of speech would be combined with high quality of discussion. The problem can be approached from two directions. One is to help users navigate through content and quickly locate the higher quality posts. Another, which is the topic of this article, is to help users improve the quality of their own posts by providing them with meaningful feedback.
One important consideration for those who want to write better comments is how much detail to leave out. Our statistical analysis shows that for many users there is a strong connection between the ratings and the size of their comments. For example, for Yvain (Scott Alexander) and Eliezer_Yudkowsky, the average number of upvotes grows almost linearly with increasing comment length.
This trend, however, does not apply to all posters. For example, for the group of top ten contributors (in the last 30 days) to LessWrong, the average number of upvotes increases only slightly with the length of the comment (see the graph below). For quite a few people the change even goes in the opposite direction – longer comments lead to lower ratings.
Naturally, even if your longer comments are rated higher than the short ones, this does not mean that inflating comments would always produce positive results. For most users (including popular writers, such as Yvain and Eliezer), the average number of downvotes increases with increasing comment length. The data also shows that long comments that get most upvotes are generally distinct from long comments that get most downvotes. In other words, long comments are fine as long as they are interesting, but they are penalized more when they are not.
The rating patterns vary significantly from person to person. For some posters, the average number of upvotes remains flat until the comment length reaches some threshold and then starts declining with increasing comment length. For others, the optimal comment length may be somewhere in the middle. (Users who have accounts on both Lesswrong and Omnilibrium can check the optimal length for their own comments on both websites by using this link.)
Obviously length is just one among many factors that affect comment quality and for most users it does not explain more than 20% of variation in their ratings. We have a few other ideas on how to provide people with meaningful feedback on both the style and the content of their posts. But before implementing them, we would like to get your opinions first. Would such feedback be actually useful to you?