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

Comments

[jauntyalan]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

(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]

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]

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]

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 ...