[MattPalmer1086]

Just a note you may find helpful. I feel your post is too long to be digested and responded to in a forum like this.

Maybe I'm wrong, and if so I apologise! But as soon as I saw the essay like format, I knew I wasn't going to spend time on it. I think shorter points that provoke discussion may work better here.

[csa]

Just a note you may find helpful.

> I feel your post is too long

It’s about 700 words.

It’s thought through, well-written, neatly organized, and it’s a fine set up for further discussion.

If that’s too long for you on this forum, then I’d probably take a look in the mirror and ask some tough questions.

[godelski]

Thanks for the support. I know I can be wordy but I also come to HN to have more nuanced conversations than somewhere like Twitter or Reddit. Honestly, I think a lot of political fighting is caused by removal of nuance and the tendency to be rushing for rushing's sake.

[mlyle]

The tricky thing is, long posts like this tend to provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing, and then either going way down into the definitional weeds or galloping to the next nitpick without acknowledging any error.

I think the long content is fine as it stands, but it isn't necessarily a good seed for discussion in a comment thread (as opposed to an underlying article).

[godelski]

  > provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing

I'd say that's where the community is made. Either the community supports this type of behavior or not.

I'll at least say I sometimes downvote opinions I agree with and upvote opinions I disagree with. That's because I don't see the upvote and downvote as a signal of my personal feeling about the comment but rather about how I feel the comment should be placed in ordering. Sometimes I downvote a comment I agree with because it is a bad argument and I want to discourage that behavior. Or because it is just signaling or ignores the parent. Sometimes I upvote bad comments because there's a conversation I want highlighted. Sometimes because despite it being bad I think they bring up good points others are ignoring.

But I think we can have more in depth conversations on HN. That comment was much longer than I usually write (and I'm wordy) but I think it is a matter of what we want as a community. For example, I always downvote oneliners, memes, or when someone is just trying to dunk on the other person.

What does the community want?

[godelski]

I appreciate the comment, I know I can be a bit wordy. I tried to organize so it's visually easy to get the tldr and each block could tell you the tldr from the first sentence. If you have suggestions of how to distill, I'm open to the feedback. Or if you'd like to add a tldr yourself that's a good contribution.

But also, this is HN. I wouldn't have this conversation on Twitter and I hope we can have more nuanced conversations here, as well as I hope the average user has a bit more intelligence/attention than a place like Reddit. Maybe I'm assuming incorrectly