That's really interesting. I hope you don't mind if I give my various thoughts, even if they're also rather bitty.
I like the idea of having somewhere with more in-depth/productive discussion.
I've often felt the lack of interesting responses to an interesting thought, and realised that most probably many of the responses I'd like just didn't exist in the people I knew; I'd post something about Hume's Fork, and feel like everyone knew all about it except me, but actually most people didn't even know as much as I did, and the few who knew more knew SO MUCH more it was impossible to tell if they actually understood something better, or had just taken a departure into a little world of philosopher's jargon.
Conversely, when I feel like that, I often find I'm more in love with the idea, and actually I would do better to look for somewhere existing which would fulfil what I want. I sort of hope that's not the case, as somewhere interesting, populated by people I already know and like, is more fun.
When I think about something like this, I often think about it in terms of what forum would be appropriate. Email is good for some forms of communication; IRC for others; voice for some; Stack Exchange for questions with finitely many answers[1]. What is best for serious discussion? I imagine something wiki-like, where you can tag responses as being to this paragraph or that one, or to the whole post, and the original post may slowly evolve to present a good summary of the topic. But that's probably overambitious here.
[1] One useful thing about the Stack Overflow model is that it distinguishes between answers and comments.
Building a community is always difficult. cf. Making Light or similar. But having any standards is useful, if you want to say, this post specifically seeks useful comments, not-thought-out stuff (even if funny or correct) goes elsewhere (either elsewhere entirely or in a companion "discussion" post).
You might think in terms of a new medium, a new forum, or even just a tag for posts in existing journals to say "I'm going to moderate this post, only constructive stuff here pls".
I remember a cultural disconnect when Language Log enabled comments. Authors tended to expect only comments of the form "ah, yes, I'm an expert in that and it turns out [explanation] as described in [citations]", but people expected to say things like "that reminds me of something interesting I read" and "I don't know, but I think X, does anyone agree".
One problem I have is never knowing in advance what _will_ be interesting: often my tongue in cheek posts turn out to expose what I really think, whereas my supposedly serious posts meander and don't go anywhere.
I think communities inherently have problems with scaling. (I've toyed with the idea of imposing arbitrary/geographical partitions on groups as they grow, allowing people to mix anywhere, but encouraging a sense of community within smaller groups by default.) But scaling as much as possible is obviously good. But it's a good start to have even a simple policy, preferably enforced by moderation, perhaps by mods or by post authors.
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Date: 2010-11-20 12:46 am (UTC)I like the idea of having somewhere with more in-depth/productive discussion.
I've often felt the lack of interesting responses to an interesting thought, and realised that most probably many of the responses I'd like just didn't exist in the people I knew; I'd post something about Hume's Fork, and feel like everyone knew all about it except me, but actually most people didn't even know as much as I did, and the few who knew more knew SO MUCH more it was impossible to tell if they actually understood something better, or had just taken a departure into a little world of philosopher's jargon.
Conversely, when I feel like that, I often find I'm more in love with the idea, and actually I would do better to look for somewhere existing which would fulfil what I want. I sort of hope that's not the case, as somewhere interesting, populated by people I already know and like, is more fun.
When I think about something like this, I often think about it in terms of what forum would be appropriate. Email is good for some forms of communication; IRC for others; voice for some; Stack Exchange for questions with finitely many answers[1]. What is best for serious discussion? I imagine something wiki-like, where you can tag responses as being to this paragraph or that one, or to the whole post, and the original post may slowly evolve to present a good summary of the topic. But that's probably overambitious here.
[1] One useful thing about the Stack Overflow model is that it distinguishes between answers and comments.
Building a community is always difficult. cf. Making Light or similar. But having any standards is useful, if you want to say, this post specifically seeks useful comments, not-thought-out stuff (even if funny or correct) goes elsewhere (either elsewhere entirely or in a companion "discussion" post).
You might think in terms of a new medium, a new forum, or even just a tag for posts in existing journals to say "I'm going to moderate this post, only constructive stuff here pls".
I remember a cultural disconnect when Language Log enabled comments. Authors tended to expect only comments of the form "ah, yes, I'm an expert in that and it turns out [explanation] as described in [citations]", but people expected to say things like "that reminds me of something interesting I read" and "I don't know, but I think X, does anyone agree".
One problem I have is never knowing in advance what _will_ be interesting: often my tongue in cheek posts turn out to expose what I really think, whereas my supposedly serious posts meander and don't go anywhere.
I think communities inherently have problems with scaling. (I've toyed with the idea of imposing arbitrary/geographical partitions on groups as they grow, allowing people to mix anywhere, but encouraging a sense of community within smaller groups by default.) But scaling as much as possible is obviously good. But it's a good start to have even a simple policy, preferably enforced by moderation, perhaps by mods or by post authors.