Review Comments Poll

Clarification: By optional, I mean that people who wanted comments on their reviews would be allowed to have them and people who did not want comments on their reviews would not be forced to have them.

Tim told me to ask this here.

Can you contextualize it a bit more? Point to a thread, maybe.

Shall we summarize the pro and con arguments?

Here's the most recent thread in all of its 435-message glory.

I'll elaborate on the proposal a bit.

First, the main thing people are concerned about is that there would be criticism and nastiness.

Since comments would only be allowed on reviews of people who wanted them, I'm not concerned about criticism per se.

To avoid nastiness, I've suggested that there be a list somewhere on a profile sub-page showing all the comments that a person has made, and that ToS-violating comments actually be removed rather than just hidden.

People have suggested that nasty comments wouldn't be noticed in order to be flagged. I've suggested that there are plenty of threads where users ask for help in dealing with problems (Spam Groups, Combining Work to be Done), so one thread could easily resolve this problem.

There's an issue of whether review comments would be too inane. This comes down to the development time spent; if Tim is in super-development mode like now, and the comments turn out to be uninteresting, it's not really a big loss. Personally I think people would say interesting things enough to make it worthwhile.

YouTube comments are terrible. Fortunately LT isn't YouTube; the quality of comments says more about the quality of the site's community than about the nature of comments in general.

There are other places to have book discussion. Great, but having discussion in one place doesn't prevent having it in another place too. I'm not convinced that the other proposed methods for generating discussion would be as effective anyway. Reading review comments could be seamlessly integrated into the process of reading reviews; going to look at conversations about a book (even assume an improved Conversations feature that distinguished real conversations from mentions) would require stopping what you were doing and going somewhere else.

Basically, people often write good, thought-provoking reviews here. It would be nice if they could develop naturally into discussions.

On the issue of whether the reviewer would notice their comments, there should be some optional notification comment, but a discussion doesn't have to involve the reviewer anyway in order to be interesting and worthwhile.

If other people were interested in following the discussions that they had participated in, maybe the Comments You've Made on Reviews page could be organized like Talk.

I'm about to go out now, but here's a brief summary. I'll add more and polish later.

Follow-up polls to clarify the issue:

I think it's fair to add, not wishing to rehash the whole thread, that there was a strong body of support for having discussion of a work on the appropriate work page and quite a few people felt that to have discussions focused on the reviews themselves made it about the reviews not the work and that it was not an appropriate shift of focus.

Apparently there can only be one poll per message. Sorry for the multiple posts and any confusion that's arisen. Now I really am going out.

okay, one more comment. I don't think discussion of the book can be separated entirely from discussion of people's opinions of the book. Discussing the book and discussing the review aren't that different.

Very Good recap Zoe. The only thing not addressed, is what happens if there are comments and the book/review is removed (not in anger necessarily, but weeding the collection). That was brought up in the other thread but not really hashed out, I thought.

>11 FicusFan:.

I'm of two minds about this one. I think (a) comments should follow the review. But also (b) should be retained like Talk posts.

Maybe the link to them should disappear if the parent review disappears, but if someone still has a link, or has it starred or something, then they can still get to it.

But also, since it's attached to YOUR review, it should probably just go to a READ-ONLY/Frozen state, so nobody else can add new messages to it...

Also not addressed--how are you going to have it so that "people who wanted comments on their reviews would be allowed to have them and people who did not want comments on their reviews would not be forced to have them"? To me, that is a description of an opt-in situation.

Edited because I mixed my words up

> 13 I would think that would be a Tim thing. Either set something in your profile and/or let you check a box when writing the review to accept comments or not.

14. I think that normally I would like to see comments. I would like to see why the person who flagged my review not-a-review did so and perhaps respond. But there might be a review for the record that I would like to have stand on its own, unremarked. So I would like a box to check; the checked box would allow comments.

Robert

>13 christiguc: I was trying to avoid specifying opt-in or opt-out, since that's a whole other issue in itself. Personally I'd prefer opt-out, with a certain choosing period before the default takes effect.

>12 aethercowboy: I was thinking the comment links should remain on the Work page, below all the other reviews.

>15 Mr.Durick: I don't have strong feelings about whether comments should be allowed per review or per user, except that I'd imagined per-user would be easier to code.

Okay, I'm not voting until I get clarification on something that (Zoe, I think) said/wanted in the other thread.

IF I do NOT want comments on my reviews, would my reviews still be visible on the works page?

>17 Heather19: Yes.

I was just trying to prove a point there, that the issue isn't only about protecting your own data.

Thank you. Now I've voted.

I don't want to comment on other's reviews, and I don't want comments on my reviews. However, if review comments are optional, and no one tries to poke/prod me into allowing comments on my own reviews, I see no reason not to let *other* people allow comments.

Thanks :)

I was reading that thread until last weekend (then had to stop because it was driving me crazy) and before I read it, I was ambivalent about review comments, even leaning towards wanting them. But after reading the thread, the last thing I want is comments tied to directly to reviews.

On the third hand, I wouldn't mind seeing a Work Discussion section linked under Details | Cover | Editions that is like a threaded blog comments page or threaded talk page. Basically, a talk thread but where you can reply directly to someone and it'll be under that comment and indented.

I don't dislike the idea of talking about reviews, but I *don't* want them on the reviews page (maybe a link to the work's Discussion page near the review) and I don't want any of it visible on the main work page. I also don't care one way or the other about comments on my reviews or giving comments to other people's reviews, but if it were opt-in, I probably wouldn't turn them on.