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

[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!"