This is more of a guess than something I've confirmed actually exists, but I'm sure it's going around -- if you've ever had it please say so below.

There's a lot of people who seem to delete comments because they feel like making those comments was a mistake, or regret them.

I also believe there's a lot of people that type up entire responses and then delete them and don't respond. This one happens on reddit a lot but I think it happens more here.

What's causing these and how can we go about alleviating them so people aren't afraid of participating?

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EDIT: Getting the impression that just talking about this as a thing that exists might help some as there's not actually that much reason to worry. Participation is much better than non-participation!

I think one of the stronger aspects of Hexbear compared to reddit is a completely opposite philosophy on participation. On reddit votes and downvotes were intended to eliminate "fluff" commenting, attempting to encourage an environment where people only comment if they've got something valuable to add to the conversation and downvoting anyone that doesn't (this was the original culture and intention of their system). Here on the other hand we kinda have the opposite going and it's nicer, more human and more about actually chatting an interacting with other people.

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      So like... Typing a comment and only after typing it up realising that others are already saying it?

      Hmm, maybe putting the comment box below the comment section entirely would change this? So that people scroll through a comment section before firing off a top-level comment. If I had to guess that might reduce top-level commenting while increasing comment replies to existing comments, not sure though UX differences produce really big behavioural changes on a lot of sites.

        • Awoo [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          That's definitely a thought that crossed my mind but maybe not? It's quite hard to say whether it would reduce participation, instead of writing their duplicate top-level comment they might instead engage with someone else who was making that comment and add further thoughts on what someone else said -- creating fewer duplicate conversations and instead deeper conversations among the people that would have written duplicates.

          There's a few possible ways for the engagement to change and it's pretty hard to predict without testing.