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

[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.