Gentle reminder to read longer discussions before posting in them?

[codinghorror]

Continuing the discussion from I'm not interested in having the same discussions every day for the rest of my life:

@anon3072533

Usually if I want to post something in a long thread that I haven’t read all of, I’ll use the search function to try to see if someone has already posted that thought. Of course it may or may not help, depending on the wording used, but by doing that I have sometimes found that my brilliant thought/news/reference/pun was already posted in the topic.

One thing I’m leaning heavily toward is a gentle reminder, when you enter a new topic and begin replying, that you should have read at least some of it.

Thanks for contributing to the discussion! To promote thoughtful discussion, and ensure that everyone’s voice is being heard, please read 40 other people’s replies before submitting your own.

This would only appear for long discussions (50 posts or more) and it’d be a generous threshold like 40%, with perhaps a cap of 200 just to protect us from megatopics… ain’t nobody reading 40% of a 10,000 reply topic just to reply…

I like this because it’s a little speed bump intended to give us thoughtful discussions.

[Melizmatic]

You can’t use tech to facilitate other people having better manners or any consideration, but good luck with all that.

[Jesse13927]

I like the idea, but I would suggest something more like “40% of all posts OR all posts made in the past month.”

If a topic is relatively new and/or has few posts, one should look through most, if not all, previous posts. However, for mega topics that stretch back years, you are going to stretch people’s recollection if you go back more than a month or so.

[codinghorror]

Someone else pointed out we could also advertise the Summarize feature as well, to get the TL;DR version of a topic:

Feedback requested: improved topic summary mode

Every forum has the TL;DR problem of regularly generating topics that have 100, 200, 500, or even a thousand posts. What I’d like to know is, who the heck is reading all 500+ posts in a giant topic? [image] Unfortunately, I think the answer is often “almost nobody”. With Discourse we designed in “best of” mode for topics specifically to address this, to give visitors a handy reader’s digest condensed version of long topics by algorithmically picking the “best” posts in a topic and hiding / …

Not sure how many people use this feature, but it is intended for “wow, there are 200 replies, I certainly don’t have time to read all of that, but perhaps you could show me a representative sample and I could quickly read that before replying?”

[TornPaperNapkin]

I didn’t know that existed fwiw.

[codinghorror]

Well, the idea is you’d see it when you entered at the top, and while staring down the precipice of 500+ replies… see the sweet release of a

Summarize this Topic

eject button. Give it a try on a few older topics. Topics must have at least 50 replies before they offer the summarize mode.

[TornPaperNapkin]

Wow … l like it. And it’s been right there the whole time too! Does it just take a random sample or much liked posts or something? I cant believe I never even noticed the button! I tend to feel almost a duty to read the whole of old posts before commenting though.

[Melizmatic]

Sorry for posting this here, but most of the other meta threads are already closed;

What’s with the new look on Direct Messages?

And, like… WHY?

Of all the improvements that users have been asking, nay, BEGGING for (block feature, much?) …why make needless superficial aesthetic changes that are distracting to the eye?

[GulliverFoyle]

@codinghorror

Someone else pointed out we could also advertise the Summarize feature as well

I’d guess you’d get more millage out of that than adding an admonition that most commenters will ignore if they’re not already predisposed to to peruse the thread anyway.

Advertising a useful feature offers them something, rather than asking something of them. And the Summarize button is a useful feature, but one it’s easy to forget about even when one knows it’s there. Also, I’m not sure what the threshold for the Summarize feature is, but if it’s 200 comments, maybe it could kick in at a 100 comments?