Comic Page for Wednesday, July 22nd, 2015

Page 874, Chapter 18

Links: Primary, Archive, Mirror

Caption: How to make Friends, Step 1: Don't Arrest Them

Characters appearing: Flora, Trace, Daniels, Not Daniels 1&2 ,Kei

Bonus sketch of page: Primary , Mirror

Recently, I feel like all the questions are simple one and done things, and reading responses for a thread where everything has no room for discussion, is kind of like looking at a long list, and gets boring fast. I may be in a small minority, but I left /r/askreddit because the questions were repeated weekly, and I could look at a thread title, and know the contents. So I was wondering what people here thought about trying to come up with titles/questions that had more interesting topics, that look for discussion more.

Similar to the difference between.

"What's your favorite book?"

and

"What do you think makes your favorite book good?"

I think one brings about more discussion, and you can really see why people would want to talk, instead of just listing a title and saying it's their favorite.

So, what do you guys think about this? Should threads be simple? Or should they be trying harder to promote a discussion within the comments?

As you've probably seen in a very recent thread by voyager, some people seem to not being using the downvote button for things that seem to not add to the discussion, but for things people disagree with. As well as this, I have seen multiple one word witty quips, and threads that, frankly, don't give much room for discussion or /t/asksnapzu. Although I don't have a proposed solution for the second issue.

However, I do have a proposal for the first. I'm sure that many users do want quality discussion, and that they do not think views that do not align with their own should be removed, but vitriolic, and harsh words should not be among them. I'm not saying that the use of swears and cusses should not be allowed. Because I fucking love those sometimes, but I don't think posts which attack users, or are designed to incite rage/malice should not be tolerated by the userbase. One of the most beautiful things about this site is how well people get along so far. So why allow users to be harsh, and quite frankly, rude. An important thing is being civil, and I quite frankly cannot find a post attacking an author based on one simply misuse of a word, then continuing to read too far into as civil.

So I believe, the downvote button should not only be for comments that do not contribute, but comments which go out of their way to attack people, or demographics. Because in a real discussion, no one is going to appreciate the man screaming accusations from across the hall.

Edit: Voyager has shown to be a pretty rad guy, and I think he wants to put this behind him, so for all future reference. Voyager is great c: