The 3 embedded quotes thing is annoying...

I find that brief sections of multiple quotes carry the same conversation string while keeping the context vibrant. Past a certain point, the conversation veers, and then it’s no longer useful, but rather annoyingly redundant to add some past quotes. That’s my personal experience.

Carleas is dead wrong on this issue.
I participate in Forums where there is no limit and it works really well. This is especially good for situations where multiple posters are contributing to a particularly complex point. Posters decide when to reduce the back-quotes for clarity when necessary.
I agree that the quality of debate here is probably not up to it, but nonetheless the arbitrary 3 limit is just annoying.

Perhaps I spent too long in academia, but I have at times found it worthwhile to quote Socrates without it being redundant or requiring the entire multiply-nested quote.

:-"

I don’t think an academic experience is valid here. Often people participate every few days, or even weeks. Giving an adequate response often involves trawling back through several pages looking for the details of a sub-thread that can be days or weeks old.
With the 3 quote limit, i think, most people just guess, and guess wrongly, rather than go to the trouble of checking their facts.
The result is that so few people give adequate responses on this Forum.
The standard here is low enough as it is, with UCC acting like a thug.

Hey!! I’ve been banned from 15 message boards!! I think the standards here are pretty high!

I think you might have just contradicted yourself.
Being banned might just as well indicate the your level of debate is low; that you level of abuse is high; or that you are a poor fit to the brief for a range of reasons. More bans is not necessarily any qualification for thinking the standards are high.

I don’t see why the length of time between posts would make academic experiences less valuable. Academic philosophy happens over yet longer time spans.

Nor do I find compelling the argument that we need infinitely nested quotes in order to raise the level of discourse. Quoting, especially nested quoting, encourages drive-by philosophy, not thoughtful and nuanced replies. It is exceedingly rare to have a nested quote where both of the quoted posts added more than a couple sentences to the dialogue. This isn’t a chat room, and it shouldn’t offer functionality that encourages treating it like one.

It does not matter what you think it is, or what you think it ought to be. The fact is that for those that do not drop in everyday; or for busy threads - several times a day, more nests would save time and effort. So rather than participate in an administrative exercise of trawling the posts, more time might be given to answering points.
For myself my average is more than 7 posts per day, and I often can’t come on line for days at a time. Having more nests would help me keep on message for the many threads I contribute to.
Maybe if you participated in more threads, you would get the point? Your gross average is only about 1 post a day for the last ten years.
Your academic experience might be very good, but not relevant to the general discussions here, which are far removed from academe.

I know that Lev, but have you seen anything except severely controversial ideas here that made me bannable? Do you really believe that my level of debate is low? I have a spatial IQ off the charts, and I’m not offensive, unless I talk about God or sex… and people hate to be proven wrong on these topics. I even understand the robotic mechanism of why I was banned. Not everything is easy to see… just because you are banned, doesn’t mean you are wrong, you are an asshole or you are an idiot. There’s politics at play as well. Females complain, the males ban me, females see my posts and they ban me.

My point is that when you are linking to a post, it can have layers of context that don’t take up much server space, but are useful for summary of the part of the thread engaged upon, and sometimes, though not always, this involves more than 3 embeddings. I know that some boards have quotes that take up lots of server space because everyone just presses the reply button without thinking… but this is not always the case, that’s why I suggested a character limit.

How is a spatial IQ off the charts you might ask? When you answer the question before they hit their timer… they have to make a special note that you answered the question before they hit their timer. Do you have any idea how few people on earth can do that?

In this instance your level of debate is low. I suggested 3+ possible reasons for banning and never did i suggest that you were “wrong”, an “asshole”, nor that you were an “idiot”.
But those are also reasons why you might be banned, it would all depend on the Forum in question. And that might be about the aims, content or style of forum and nothing to do with you except that you are not a good fit for many reasons.
Being banned from 15 is not relevant to the standard here.
PS I don’t think your spatial intelligence is relevant either.

My verbal intelligence is high as well… not as high as my spatial intelligence, but far beyond the 99th percentile. Actually, I think it is very relevant. A forum that doesn’t ban the stuff I say, has a very high level of integrity.

You’re completely missing or avoiding the point I am making. Obviously IQ is not a qualification for dealing with an issue.

PS. I just had to delete the point in question due to the 3 quotes rule.

This reminds me of an interesting blog post I read arguing that post count is worth very little as a metric for the quality of discussion. And again, I don’t think the ability to make quick, one-liner replies is a selling point. If all we were interested in here were how many posts we could accumulate in an hour, we’d be a website about reality television or we’d just populate the forum with spam bots. We’re interested in philosophy, and quality philosophy at that, of which multiply nested quotes and the rapid-fire prattling they enable is not conducive.

Certainly we are, but it seems like we agree that a more academic trajectory would do the site some good, right?

The rationale for restricting the quote depth is not server space. It is in part aesthetic, because nested quotes make for an unwieldy and uninviting presentation, and it is in part functional, because the mechanics of a site can affect the way users interact with it, and nested quotes do so by encouraging short posts that stoke feuding and stifle progress towards understanding.

LOL! No IQ doesn’t explain everything… I agree with you. Even emotional IQ doesn’t explain everything… some people just don’t fit in the box. I have an extremely high emotional IQ as well.

But Carleas, seriously… that has to do with post count, and reputation, that has nothing to do with embedded quotes. Like i said before… my experience is that you can illuminate a discussion by embedding a particular amount of quotes, which sometimes will be more than three. That is my observation and experience here. Let’s say you make a really good point that involves 4 embedded quotes but not three, and you link to your post… well if you need all four to make the point, then if it’s three, the person has to read much more of the thread. Sometimes it’s not necessary to read a whole thread to assent it or refute it.

That hypothetical is all well and good, but look at the way you actually just used the quote feature. You quoted my entire post, which made multiple points in reply to multiple points made in multiple other posts. And you quoted all of those points and said “that has to do with post count”. “That” being the aesthetics? “That” being the fact that it’s not about server time? “That” the rapid fire?

No, you used the quote where saying “Carleas, …” would have done just as well, and you made your point less clear (and your presentation much more cluttered) by including a whole lot of discussion that appears immediately above your post.

And that’s how quoting happens in the wild. Even if there were a hypothetical post where nesting four quotes deep would really drive the point home (and I don’t think that is a realistic hypothetical), there would still be a net gain in clarity by reducing cluttery, easy copying of what the previous person said.

And if you were to, say, type out some of the things I said (e.g. “And you quoted all of those points and said ‘that has to do with post count’”), you’d be more likely to digest those things, to think about them and break them down, and to really pay attention to them and read them before you responded. Human reading comprehension, even 99+ percentile comprehension, is poor. Quoting in-line, actually using (as opposed to mentioning) someone’s words makes clear at the very least where they are ambiguous or subject to multiple interpretations. That’s a good thing for discussion.

EDIT: I apologize if the above comes across as overly confrontational; in many cases I meant “you” to serve the role of the genderless third person singular, and probably would have better conveyed my intended tone by using the word “one”.

I do often feel that the three-quote limit is too low. For here’s what that looks like:

S

::

Above you really see only two rounds: P + Q is one round, and R + S is the next. I’m all for an experimental three-round limit, meaning a five-quote limit.

Why is a longer visible history preferable? Because it’s not just about what a person says, but also about the context in which he says it–especially in a discussion. I often feel misrepresented when it seems I said something out of the blue when I did not.

Of course, one could always backtrack. But, as Muishkin argues, this can be quite a hassle. As this doesn’t seem likely to change, though, considering that you, Carleas, are the one in blue, I’d like to remind you of another recent Help And Suggestions thread: the one about post numbers. It would be nice if there was a way to search on post number, so you can meaningfully say something like "But in post # 31770, you said:

[quote]
". It would help then, though, if post numbers were more easily visible. In any case, I think I’m actually gonna link people to the oldest post in a quote string from now on–though it’s a hassle.

By the way, never forget that “quote” = 8 4 6 2 5 = 25 = 7, which is the number of philosophy (Seven Sages), so the quote limit should actually be seven.

Carleas already addressed the post number function… and it is a vibrant part of the website… just click on the header on your post and the link to your post will come up. I see no issue here.