User demand is lacking

[koganbot]

Has anyone ever asked the livejournal people why they don't have a "new comments"/"updated thread" feature? Nested threads and the lack of an update/new comments feature are the two problems that make lj a worse format than ilX for ongoing discussion.

Of course, if people want a discussion they'll have one, and I'm here basically because discussion falters and founders on ilX. But it falters and founders everywhere, to some extent (and the average comment thread on ilX is vastly better than the average comment thread on the Web as a whole). Back to my original question, an answer might well be, "Because there isn't enough user demand for such feature."

Speaking of discussion, yesterday the convo about Rihanna lyrics migrated here ("Fire Bomb") and here ("Te Amo") (EDIT: and over to Dave's Tumblr, and somehow I missed Erika a few days ago here, with pre-revisionist Dave on the comment thread). And Chuck and I added lotsa new content to poptimists' artist shoutouts thread (with Chuck grumbling about how the convos there are already over before he gets a chance to contribute to them).

Meanwhile over on Tumblr, Maura writes (in regard to chillwave/beach-pop/wavegaze, a music genre, apparently, though if everything runs true to form I'll not hear any of it until no one's making it anymore, but anyway I'm linking Maura's post not for the music wave but for its relevance to dropped discussions):

Maybe this is another thing about the appeal of this particular music to people who write online — it's in some ways a reflection? People on all sides are trying to muddle through their creative impulses with tools that allow for instant publishing/dissemination, and by extension the impulse to get something out overtakes the impulse to make something "right" in whatever abstract sense.

And Tom adds:

I think that's very likely it. (talking about "chillwave"). "Perfect is the enemy of done" and all that - a big current in internet thought.

And I'll add that "news" is the enemy of discussion, which is a different point. "Perfect is the enemy of done" can encourage discussion, if the attitude is "let's throw our ideas forth for the general convo to modify and elaborate on rather than trying to perfect 'em first, alone." Whereas "let's jump to what's new and what's hot" only encourages discussion if there are already good ongoing convos that can add in the new topic. If not, the jumping is just more reason to avoid follow through. --In old media, rock journalism, and journalism in general, always veered towards news superseding follow-through, so why should the Web be different? Not a rhetorical question, since maybe the Web will evolve to something different, but journalism was the way it was at least partly owing to customer demand (customers being advertisers as well as readers, of course).

EDIT: Kuhnian content on comment thread.

Comments

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

never asked them about updated thread thing myself, but it was the very FIRST thing i wondered about when i first landed myself an LJ account

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

there's a rather primitive "newest comments on your threads" feature, on your LJ homepage (well on mine)

[koganbot]

Yes, and also email notifications of replies to comments, the problem being that I can see them but no one else can, since there's no general alert to others when something has been updated on a site.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I assume the updated-thread thing isn't a feature of LJ because the initial focus was on diary-style blogging, but on a platform where you could collect all your mates' diary blogs in one feed. However I don't know why they didn't at least think about it when they introduced communities, where discussion is surely the whole point?

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The closest thing they have is the comment tracking feature which is opt-in on a post-by-post basis (rather than say, a user-by-user basis). I tend to use this on large threads that I don't start but want to follow - not sure if this is just a paid-user account feature tho.

[koganbot]

"Comment tracking" doesn't jump to mind as something I've seen on my lj homepage, but then I'm not always the quickest to notice what's available. But still, even if I give myself comment tracking, that doesn't alert anyone else.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

is it possible to collate RSS feeds* for communities? This is an opt-in rather than an opt-out procedure, but -- if it's doable -- then you could also make a point of noting it to potential contributors.

*ie they request the RSS for a community and then all updates pop into their email inboxes? The arrival of RSS as a social habit for many (not in fact me) might be why LJ haven't bothered installing their own version...

[koganbot]

From the RSS I've seen, it informs you of new posts but not new comments.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's a paid-user feature, and works on thread level as well as post level. (Right now, I see an icon of a push pin next to the date stamp on your comment, and if I click that it will take me to a page where I can set how I want to be notified if this thread is updated. I can also ask to be notified if you make a new post, or if you make a post with a specific tag (eg. "thomas kuhn").)

And since it's a paid user feature, that's why there isn't a notify-all-participants-in-thread option - it's a convenience each user decides whether or not they want to pay for.

[koganbot]

Ah ha! I've got push pins too, though I've never tried them. You see, I told you I wasn't quick to notice what's available! (But this still doesn't make lj user-friendly for conversations in the way that ilX is.)

[koganbot]

(I still owe Mark an answer to two of his question here ("what is it that is causing us to talk past each other?," part two going "needs exploration of possible reasons, from the 'mental illness' and 'poor reading/reasoning ability' of individuals to broader social or economic or political or cultural lacks, distortions, failures, misconceived institutions and practices (which presumably also beg explanation), which -- at miminum -- fail effectively to challenge or transform or even much help the poorly accoutred individuals"), though I'm swamped so probably won't get to it this month. A way to sum up part two might be "Why isn't there enough demand that we not talk past each other, and what gets in the way of meeting the demand where it does - or at least might - exist?")

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

re the gods-and-transcendence disscussion: i think my intuition here -- not at all worked into a convincing argument -- is that these have developed as institutions to against against the ravages of the demand to chase after the urgent new topic of discussion...

so that transcendence is a counter to fashion, to get us back to the discussion; and fashion is a counter to transcendence, to allow us to introduce genuinely new information

but this is very sketchily thought through indeed!

[koganbot]

And my counter to that was that "transcendence" can and does go either way, can carry the new in on wings of transcendence. Saying that "transcendence" serves one master is like saying that irony serves one master, which is to say that it's a device.

But that whole transcendence discussion was one that didn't sustain itself.

Kuhn is here, now you're gone

[koganbot]

One thing that paradigms do (in the broad Kuhnian rather than narrow Kuhnian sense of the term, meaning "A scientific community's overall commitments") is that it focuses attention on ongoing questions, gets everyone discussing related topics and moving the discussion along. "Paradigm" was Kuhn's answer to (among other questions) "How is it that scientific communities are able to do this?" (focus discussion, follow-through, and progress to the point where problems in the paradigms and questions were so evident that the paradigms could be overthrown and new questions could emerge with the same characteristic of gathering a community around the questions).

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

What Kuhn meant by paradigm -- the "small concrete model" version of the meaning -- does this; but does the "Zeitgeist" version of the meaning (ie what 9/10ths of the world *thinks* Kuhn means)? Or does Zietgeist-think actually tend to shunt the discussion back over towards This Weeks' Big Thing?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Er, yes: the zeitgeisty version is a misconception of Kuhn, hence my use of the phrase "what 9/10ths of the world *thinks* Kuhn means"... I'm suggesting two things, I guess. One is that if you leave out the "concrete puzzle solution" element of the definition, it allows the the other part of the Kuhnian definition not just to dominate, but to drift towards something very un-concrete; a zeitgeist-y misconception. And the other is that the course of this drift is away from the shared questions we ought to focus on; or be required to return to.

But yes, you could turn this the other way round, and say that rock isn't a field which has established any sense of shared "concrete puzzle solutions" -- or indeed that it ought would be good for it to ...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

bviously what i'm getting at here is not helped by (a) being a b it handwavy abt what kuhn actually thinks (since i'm interested in a misconception about what he thinks) and (b) being a bit imprecise about what constitutes a zeitgeist, because i need a word to indicate "general intellectual tendency within a field" that isn't either "fashion" or haha "paradigm"!

but actually i think i'm trying to discern a cause in an effect: to explain why the kuhnian misconception took hold by invoking the tendency not to hold still -- outside science -- on the "questions we need to return to"

[koganbot]

But I'll add - and I don't think you'd disagree, or I hope that you don't disagree - is that by not returning to the questions we do hold still. A question Kuhn was posing (and that "paradigm" in both senses is supposed to answer) was how is it that science progresses more than the nonsciences do, and how does it come to overthrow its core ideas more than the nonsciences do, the two questions being linked in his answer in that without the normal progression of a field working on its ideas until it gets to the point where it isolates and focuses on insoluble problems that the paradigm can no longer handle, you don't end up with the mass overthrow of ideas that you get in a paradigm shift. (Which isn't to say that you never get shifts outside science.)

[koganbot]

Comment that you're commenting on is now below, since I'd mistyped one of the sentences so badly that I had to rewrite.

Yes, I understood that you weren't attributing zeitgeistiness to Kuhn. But one thing I'm working towards in regard to Kuhn is how can we - at times, not all the time - achieve something of the focus that paradigms give scientists even though we're not trained to have puzzle solutions in common and theories in common. (Not that "we don't have a paradigm" answers my question as to why we can't sustain intellectual discussions. It doesn't explain why so few people are interested in my questions regarding class, or are capable of discussing them. The questions may be difficult to answer but they're not difficult to ask or to understand, and they're not esoteric.

[koganbot]

No no no no, Kuhn meant two things by "paradigm," narrow (concrete puzzle solution) and broad (the totality of a particular field's or subfield's commitments) and Kuhn is saying that that the broad commitments as well as the narrow serve to focus the field. By the way, I think his two meanings of paradigm bleed into each other, but something like "How do we explain and predict the motion of the moon using Newton's laws of motion?" or "What is the medium through which light waves move?" and "How do we explain gravity in quantum terms?" are not small concrete models, they're attempts to apply a body of theory. But they're not zietgeist either; "general relativity" and "Newton's laws of motion" are not the spirit of their respective times, even if they affected such spirits. Think of the difference between the three above questions and the question "Does it make sense for me to link Taylor and Rihanna to Byron?" which is one that I'm currently asking myself. The latter may result in a good essay by me, but I doubt that it will result in a good sustained discussion (just as Marcus's Elvis essay in Mystery Train and his Sex Pistols essay in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock & Roll didn't result in good sustained discussion, though they deserved to).

Throughout the eighteenth century those scientists who tried to derive the observed motion of the moon from Newton's laws of motion and gravitation consistently failed to do so. As a result, some of them suggested replacing the inverse square law with a law that deviated from it at small distances. To do that, however, would have been to change the paradigm, to define a new puzzle, and not to solve the old one. In the event, scientists preserved the rules until, in 1750, one of them discovered how they could be successfully applied.
--Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. p.39.

I don't think I can come close to imagining an equivalent statement about rock criticism. Compare the Kuhn passage to my asking, "Since people like their favorite music for what I loosely call 'visceral' or 'aesthetic reasons' rather than for where their liking it places them socially, how is it that taste tends to cluster along the lines of social class subclass? But oops! now I need to work out anew what I mean by class?" You don't get masses of critics going, "Oh to the no! Frank hath reworked the notion of class! We must all replace our old questions with the new!"

[koganbot]

along the lines of social class AND subclass, that is.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Even excluding the rappers, I think I'd be hard pressed to name an artist who DIDN'T mention other artists at least a few times over their discography! And even after that you get obvious references without the name being mentioned (eg on Rihanna's "Wait Your Turn", "I'm such a fucking lady" is a Remy Ma reference even if Rihanna doesn't mention Remy Ma by name).

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Without wanting to repeat myself too much, the thread was basically me wondering how often other artists got randomly mentioned (as per Miley Cyrus hearing a Jay-Z song on the radio - that could have been ANY popular artist or even a song title, but her songwriter happened to pick Jay-Z) as opposed to eg a song being entirely dedicated to an artist (eg Kanye's 'Big Brother'), or a long list of artists, or a shout-out to an artist closely linked to themselves.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

And also whether this was more prevalent in eg country and hiphop than pop and rock (which it seems it is!) - what I didn't get round to asking is whether this possibly reflects anything about the level of egotism in these genres.