Freedom to comment! Or "to everyone deserving"

    There is nothing sadder in the world than the life cycle of commentary. It does not even matter where he began his existence, in the privileged underbelly of blogs or in the general car of the forum thread. Sooner or later, he will be walled up like a brick in a mass of his own kind in a wall of communication obstruction.

    How long will this continue, citizens? Why, at least break into a cake, even set out amazing revelations in the commentary, will he still have a chance of independent existence, zero or almost zero?

    At most, links will be put on the page with the comment and search engines will start to give it out as deeply relevant. But these are search engines, and society itself, the system itself, in which this rough diamond appeared - will show zero attention. Well, except that compassionate will put a dozen pluses - a pathetic fee for genius.

    Why in progressive systems like the habr a good post pops up and is exposed to the masses, and does the good comment get the role of Cinderella (in its pre-slipper stage)?

    Yes, they made sure that the “bad” comments collapse (to be honest, the effect is the opposite, I personally always watch them. I believe that the others too).

    But what to do with the “good” comments?
    I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time, and here’s the thought.

    But what if showing good comments is as beautiful as a blog post? At least in the feed of announcements. Thus, a good comment will receive additional exposure and additional traffic. This is the first.

    Second- when switching from the announcement of such a comment, to focus attention on it, and not on the root message. The reddit has such an option (see the picture) - to show the branch on a separate page, it looks extremely logical, and does not ripple with peripheral information noise.

    Thus, we receive an injection of attention precisely inside the tree of communication, and increase the effectiveness of focal commentary.



    Yes, there is a danger that such a comment or message will still look taken out of context and still have to look at the history of the discussion, which means that a significant proportion of readers will not understand what's what and will not be able to competently engage in communication.

    Here we come to the third point, I would say the key in the struggle for the life of our comments.
    Generally speaking, a comment claiming to exist independently should be as self-sufficient as possible. That is, it should contain or be adjacent to the digest of the previous discussion so that the reader has a minimal need to unscrew the feed from the parent messages.

    If you contain it, it will resemble an English fairy tale, remember:

    And this is a funny bird-tit,
    Which often steals wheat,
    Which is stored in a dark closet
    In the house
    that Jack built.
    etc.

    You tell me - some kind of nonsense. And you will be right.

    Why should the exact, good, brilliant commentary drag the load of the old context ?! So another solution is needed -side by side .

    I have two suggestions:

    1. Let there be an opportunity to look at the discussion line in a bird's eye view. That is, a kind of strategic view - only strong * (highlighted important phrases) and announcements of very positive comments (I wrote about it here ). You can algorithmically limit the number of messages in the window, say, to 10-12, that is, leave the most characteristic. We get some automated digest of the background of our focal comment.

    2. In addition to the roles of a writer / reader, let there also be the role of the “Digest”, that is, a person who from time to time concisely fixes the achieved positions of the interlocutors. For this, the digest will receive fat pluses in karma, and it’s understandable for what - it performs the work of “orderly tail of the discussion”.

    *A bit about strong . This is an opportunity for the author to emphasize / highlight significant phrases in the message. When the message is expanded, they are not visible (why spoil the style given by the author). But if the message is minimized to show the bird's flight mode, then it is these highlights or strongs that are visible . These are essentially headers.

    Summary


    Thus, in order to level the Comment in rights with the Post, we must:
    1. Learn how to direct traffic to decent comments. That is, give additional exposure.
    2. To provide such comments with the demonstration interface as clean as possible from tree neighbors. At the very least, start the page with a focal comment.
    3. To enable the reader to quickly determine the context for the comment to appear, that is, give access to a manual digest or view of the comment and the previous “bird's-eye” discussion.

    Why am I writing all this? I am looking for constructive interlocutors. The task of creating an ideal communication system is much broader than the problems described here.

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