List Posts
Yesterday @talklittle posted the topic Halloween game sales are live. What are your Horror/Halloween-themed recommendations?. There have been some good recommendations and whatnot. If you like horror games and weren't aware of the ongoing sales, go check out the comments for some recommendations.
Being the meta-killjoy that I am, I started this sidebar about the top comment. tl;dr: I don't think this type of content engenders Tildes's discussion forward community.
Fell free to read the whole thread of comments for some civil discussion on the matter, but I do want to open this up to all of Tildes: should this type of comment be policed on Tildes?
Also: do you think this type of comment is good? Do you agree with me that it's retroactive to Tildes's goals? Am I just a big killjoy? Given that the comment I'm calling into question is the top comment of that topic, I'm probably David in this arena but I want to hear it from everyone else.
For that specific comment—it's a recommendation thread. I don't think it makes much sense to say, "no, that's too many recommendations in one comment". I think you have to recognize that the value isn't entirely in whether any discussion can happen in response to a specific comment, there's also value to people that are reading the thread who are just... looking for recommendations. It serves that purpose well, and I think if people want to discuss something specific in it they can easily quote just the section related to that specific game and use that as a jumping-off point.
In a more general sense, one of the main issues with reddit is that it has no real ability to deal with different "types" of posts inside the same subreddit. If a particular type of post isn't ideal and will tend to push out higher-quality types of content in the subreddit, you don't really have any choice except to ban it entirely. As a placating measure, this often involves a completely separate subreddit to shunt those posts off to, and/or a weekly post for people to make those types of posts. That's why /r/Games has a weekly "suggestions requests" thread, /r/truegaming has "casual Fridays" that allows list posts, and so on.
I think Tildes can do a much better job of this, and has already started towards it with the ability to filter out (or look exclusively for) particular tags. If you don't like seeing list posts, you can filter out "ask.recommendations" and/or "ask.survey". In extreme cases, maybe in the future we have some default filters in some groups, and users have to specifically opt in to seeing certain types of posts, instead of needing to opt out.
I think you completely have a point, I don't think list comments lead to very good discussion. However how tildes addresses this shapes what tildes is to become. Do we want to restrict this type of content? It might not be a starting point for discussion but I think it has value. It gives people more information about the topic and is sort of the start and end of a discussion within one comment. Like I said, I think list posts are a problem for discussion, but I'd like to look at ways we might incorporate them into a post that makes the post more valuable while keeping it out of the comments.