Annual Review of Comment Visibility Strategy
Once comment visibility strategy prevents one awkward moment, it must remain in force for the rest of the routine.
INCIDENT REPORT Subject: Comment Visibility Strategy (CVS): Annual Review Status: Active, pending no change
Summary
Comment visibility strategy encompasses the decisions made between the moment a comment is composed and the moment it is posted, or not posted. This review covers the review period's incidents in order of their significance to the procedural record.
Incident 1: The Qualified Agreement
A public post with which the practitioner substantially agreed contained one clause the practitioner found imprecise. A comment was drafted that agreed with the post's general thesis while noting the imprecision. The comment was 94 words. The practitioner identified that a 94-word agreement with a qualification reads, in the current climate, as a critique with a preamble.
The comment was revised to 47 words. The 47-word version lost the agreement and retained only the qualification. The practitioner identified this as worse than the original. The comment was abandoned. The practitioner liked the post.
Incident 2: The Reply to a Thread Already Concluded
A comment thread on a post from eight days prior was found to contain an error of fact. The practitioner composed a correction. The thread was last active six days before the correction was written. The correction was factually sound. It was not posted, because posting a correction to a six-day-old thread is categorically different from posting a correction to an active thread, and the category it falls into is not one the practitioner wished to occupy.
The comment was written. It was not posted. It has been in the draft state for eleven days.
Incident 3: The Visibility Calculation
A comment was drafted in response to a post with eleven hundred interactions. The practitioner calculated that a comment on a high-interaction post is seen by a different audience than a comment on a low-interaction post. The content of the comment was not revised to account for this. The comment was posted after a delay of thirty minutes, during which the practitioner checked the account of one other commenter to assess the context they were entering.
Annual Finding
Comment visibility strategy continues to function as an obstacle between the practitioner and most comments they compose, which is its stated purpose, and also prevents comments the practitioner would, in hindsight, have been glad to post. These two outcomes cannot be separated at the point of composition. The strategy remains active.