I am playing to the karma, which is one reason I advocate my suggestion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936306 where people could agree with my zing yet still bury my comment as a bad contribution.
When voting, I vote up for "interesting point", for "you put a lot of effort into this reply" and for "I agree" and "ha!". I feel conflicted downvoting a comment I like even if it's not contributory, and I don't want to upvote a comment I disagree with even if it's a good contribution. Split the two up so the conflict goes away.
You are playing into the cult of personality
It's what the site's design encourages - usernames are prominent, vote scores are prominent and tallied as the main measure of a person, popular comments get votes. Big thoughtful comments and deep discussion get squashed into nesting and pushed aside by the ever increasing flood of new submissions. "Furthering the discussion" as you put it ... what does this mean to you? Who is supposed to benefit and how, and does the site design encourage that?
I think furthering the discussion in this case means talking about the pros and cons of adding a comment length requirement.
Since the site owner pg is in on this thread, the community may benefit by Paul getting some feedback and ideas on how to improve the site.
The site's design does encourage conversation of course. Comments are threaded to encourage back-and-forth, and voting moderation promotes good comments and helps to keep the discussion civil.
I too like to get some karma, but I'll sometimes write something that I suspect may be down-voted (or even that I may not believe) just because I like to discuss things. Karma doesn't really matter on this site or affect your experience (other than being able to down-vote comments), and I think that fact encourages people not to treat it very seriously.
Comments
I am playing to the karma, which is one reason I advocate my suggestion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936306 where people could agree with my zing yet still bury my comment as a bad contribution.
When voting, I vote up for "interesting point", for "you put a lot of effort into this reply" and for "I agree" and "ha!". I feel conflicted downvoting a comment I like even if it's not contributory, and I don't want to upvote a comment I disagree with even if it's a good contribution. Split the two up so the conflict goes away.
You are playing into the cult of personality
It's what the site's design encourages - usernames are prominent, vote scores are prominent and tallied as the main measure of a person, popular comments get votes. Big thoughtful comments and deep discussion get squashed into nesting and pushed aside by the ever increasing flood of new submissions. "Furthering the discussion" as you put it ... what does this mean to you? Who is supposed to benefit and how, and does the site design encourage that?
I think furthering the discussion in this case means talking about the pros and cons of adding a comment length requirement.
Since the site owner pg is in on this thread, the community may benefit by Paul getting some feedback and ideas on how to improve the site.
The site's design does encourage conversation of course. Comments are threaded to encourage back-and-forth, and voting moderation promotes good comments and helps to keep the discussion civil.
I too like to get some karma, but I'll sometimes write something that I suspect may be down-voted (or even that I may not believe) just because I like to discuss things. Karma doesn't really matter on this site or affect your experience (other than being able to down-vote comments), and I think that fact encourages people not to treat it very seriously.