21
votes
What's the real difference between noise and joke?
I try to tag comments whenever I come across them to help keep the site clean. The problem I'm coming across when doing so is that I'm not entirely sure when to use noise versus joke.
The truth is, I've never come across anything that's just noise-- it's always been a joke that just feels more like noise than a joke to me.
Is there an official definition for these tags? Are different actions performed based on what the tag is?
One example of "noise" that isn't a "joke" is a comment that is a form of politeness rather than meaningful discussion. For example, comments like
Along with other (usually short) comments that don't really add anything.
What's the consensus on purposely creating noise?
I haven't done it yet but sometimes I'd like to publicly praise or thank someone for a good contribution. I wish there was a way to label your own comments as noise or even as jokes and have them immediately collapse.
It's not a big deal, I wouldn't hesitate to thank people. If it's an especially good comment you could also use the Exemplary label and include your thanks/praise in the reason there, but you can only do that once every 8 hours.
Ideally in the future I'd like to have a way for users to post a comment as something like an "aside" where, like you said, it would be collapsed by default and probably not bump the thread in the activity sort.
Courtesies are fine. Inanities not so much.
Every post and comment carries some cognitive load cost, and as a site grows, even a small percentage of noise starts to drown out, and eventually discourage, signal.
The best way to counter this is probably to have sub-communities not by topic but by group, for smaller-scale discussion, with substantive content bubbling up. How to structure those groups and how to bubble-up and assess substance are hard problems.
Yep, we've got our theories here but they have yet to survive contact with reality.
I'd like to avoid getting into a mode of 'punishing' noise, though. We all make noise. What we need to do is identify and elevate the signal in discussion threads. I hope the labels can handle that job - exemplary seems to be working great so far. It does shoot comments up the page quickly.