I don't think generic tangents should be taken to include relevant tangents. I read this part of the guidelines (in context, with the surrounding language about flamebaits & tropes) as being about using something tangentially related as an excuse to pivot the conversation to your pet issue, not as forbidding you to add color to a conversation. That doesn't seem at all compatible with promoting curious conversation. I looked at a handful of times when dang cited this rule, and it always included the part before (Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.) and was in response to flamebait comments.
I think it's interesting & provokes my curiosity to hear about how this observation doesn't hold in different jurisdictions. I don't see how it should detract from anyone else's experience of the thread.
I mean, they're table manners for a nerd messageboard so a lot more subjective than defamation law. You can always reverse engineer something out of them explaining the quality (or lack thereof) of some specific comment, after the fact.
Less subjective are the effects and you can see them here - if a comment mostly produces corrections and rules lawyering, it's not a great comment and fills up the thread with meta and fluff.
To take an even broader view - if the goal of the forum is curious conversation, good toplevel comments have to look like invitations to curious conversation to others. If others perceive the comment as reply guy well-actually-ing, the possible positive intent one can extract from it armed with the guidelines and a cheese cloth doesn't matter that much.
> Less subjective are the effects and you can see them here - if a comment mostly produces corrections and rules lawyering, it's not a great comment and fills up the thread with meta and fluff.
This is circular. I complained about this comment, therefore the comment is bad, and you can tell because I complained about it. I'd suggest it is the complaints that are noisy and should be avoided.
> To take an even broader view - if the goal of the forum is curious conversation, good toplevel comments have to look like invitations to curious conversation to others.
Anyone looking for something to nitpick and fight about will succeed. That can't be a motivation for guidelines because it's just a treadmill. My understanding is that one of the reasons the guidelines are so terse and loosely worded in the first place is to discourage rules lawyering. They aren't a book to throw at someone and say, "your comment is wrong, because you went on a tangent." (And I'm not really even convinced discussing defamation on a post about defamation should be considered a tangent.)
Circular, subjective, I'm not sure what the argument here is. There's no disagreement these rules don't meet the standards of formal logic.
Anyone looking for something to nitpick and fight about will succeed. [...] I'm not really even convinced discussing defamation on a post about defamation should be considered a tangent
Isn't that a tautology? Wait, we're not doing that.
It might not be a tangent, the tone and phrasing count too. For instance, people often write the good version of their comment after they get mod-berated, in defense of their originally iffy comment. Again, it's the effects that count. The poster could have easily written a less hackle-raising, summoning-reply-guys-to-the-reply-guy comment and we wouldn't need to define tangents from first principles to begin with.
If we're just throwing accusations of logical fallacies back and forth now, than I'd point out we've reached the point in the conversation where we're having a literal tone argument. I don't find this to be a pedantic tone (my read is that they're adding detail rather than making a pedantic correction), if you do I don't see how I can convince you or be convinced by you, so I think we'll have to agree to disagree.
(To clarify, I don't mean to suggest these rules should be held to the standard of formal logic; maybe a better way to explain my criticism would be to say, if you leave a noisy complaint in response to a comment, you are responsible for your actions, not the commenter you're responding to. I can choose to leave a noisy comment in response to any post, no matter how careful someone is with their tone or how well they follow the guidelines; if I did so, it would be no one's responsibility but my own. I can't use my reaction to justify my reaction. Similarly, we can't criticize this comment as resulting in us defining a tangent; you and I made that choice.)
Not me. I'm just saying that the story is about US defamation law, by an expert in US law. It's not a story about the concept of defamation more generally.
