Community Guidelines Feedback on "1/n"

Discourse Feedback
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I don’t want to start a broad topic on feedback of the community guidelines, I just want to point out this line seems very odd to me:

The best conversations allow for all participants to chime in. In a group of n people, try to use up 1/n space in terms of both the volume of posts and their size. Some of us only have time to respond once or twice per day.

Scenario: Two people are having a long discussion on discourse as they are both experts in the relevant field. They are therefore roughly taking up 1/2 of the conversation space. I want to make 1 small comment I find relevant, but I do not want, or need to, participate in the conversation at large.

In this scenario I am now taking up close to 0 of the discussion, I certainly do not want to take up “1/3” of the discussion. And now these users are way over the “1/3” of their space, will they be penalised?

In my experience, this kind of input to long running healthy discussions is normal, that there are some “core” people, as they are most invested or expertized in the conversation, and then “single issue” people who want to raise a point about a single issue.

Conversely, in my experiences, discussions where almost everyone feels they need to keep replying, and there are these close to “1/n” numbers, tend to be fraught conversations where people are very divided and points are being recycled and little usefulness is being made. They are therefore certainly not the “best” conversations.

Also is “Some of us only have time to respond once or twice per day.” a non-sequitur? I don’t understand how it’s relevant, in a healthy conversation that is making a lot of ground on a topic, what does it matter how many times someone posts? Maybe it’s that I mostly read a discussion, rather than respond to one, or maybe it’s because this sentence assumes the conversation is divisive? If so, it doesn’t state it, which makes the point very confusing.

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I didn’t get any impression that this is a rule that will be enforced in any way. That whole section reads as “how to be a normal person in a forum” [1]

  1. something that I am currently flunking…I’ll get back to work as soon as the coffee works ↩︎

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The 1/n rule is a rule of thumb. It’s not worth worrying about detailed numbers, it’s more about cases where a single person posts 50 times in a topic of 180 messages total, overwhelming the discussion for everybody else.

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Ah “overwhelming the discussion” makes a lot more sense.

If it’s not worth worrying about detailed numbers, could you reword this to not use a specific number? i.e 1/n

Someone could easily be way over 1/n and not overwhelming the discussion.

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A very obvious example of this is in Python Help , where that one person is OP asking a question and a large variety of different people are chiming in trying to help them. It is not surprising if OP in that case takes about ~1/2 of messages and everyone else together the other half.

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Echoing what appears to be the general consensus: consider the context and generally don’t fret over it. 1/n isn’t part of the CoC. I routinely see that “helpful suggestion” in, e.g. topics about floating-paint behavior in Python. I’m usually the only actual expert in such topics, and am usually very patient about trying to answer questions, so my posts can utterly dominate the topic for days on end. I’m not trying to hog attention - I’m typically the only one who can give reliable answers in such cases.

Similarly, e.g. for the “helpful suggestions” like (paraphrasing) “the link you’re adding was already supplied in some other post - are you sure you want to add it again?”. The answer to which is almost always “yes”. I recall one time the answer was “no”. The link was pretty useless anyway :wink:.

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Maybe it’s a typo and “try to use up” should be “try to use up to”? So, a recommended maximum of 1/N?

Edit: wait no that sounds like it’d be encouraging taking up more space :man_facepalming: so “try to use no more than”, but now we’re outside “it was a typo” territory

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I don’t think the authors expected the 1/n metric to be scrutinized as heavily as this, which in retrospect was an obvious mistake given the audience. :joy:

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To clarify on this though, IMO in a healthy conversation 1/N is a bad maximum.

For example, in this discussion, at the time of this post there are 6 unique authors, and 9 posts, I have made 3 of those posts (including this one), so I am currently at 2/N (Where N is 6). In terms of word volumne I am even more in breach of this guideline.

I hope, however, no one thinks I am overwhelming this discussion.

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Okay, we need a formula \phi(n_{posts}, N_{posters}) that asymptotically approaches \frac n N as n \to\infty, as well as a strict upper bound \Phi(n_{posts}, N_{posters}) that triggers auto-moderation.

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I have no idea what you said, but I wholeheartedly agree!

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Thanks for the feedback, we agree the wording was unclear. I’ve changed that paragraph to the following:

Avoid overwhelming a conversation and leave room for other voices. Be aware of the number, length, and frequency of your posts compared to others in the thread. It can be difficult for others to participate if a few voices take up the majority of a thread.

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