But then, producing the 'post reply' link is soliciting comentary which is also horn tooting.
If there was a way to hide comments without including the big "post comment" form at the end, I bet people would use it more often than not. (Say, if there was a way to put comments somewhere else entirely, maybe like the Yuletide archive.)
I think a lot of people want to post their fic in a "clean" format, to stand alone, all by itself, and the only way to do that is mode-reply-- the fact that the comment form is more apparent in this format is a *side effect*, not the main reason they do it.
Basically, I think this is a conflict between LJ-as-fiction-archive and LJ-as-social-tool, which makes sense, because it wasn't ever meant to function as a fiction archive, so to make it work as one (ie, to get the story by itself on a page, like on any other fiction archive) you have to use workarounds.
no subject
If there was a way to hide comments without including the big "post comment" form at the end, I bet people would use it more often than not. (Say, if there was a way to put comments somewhere else entirely, maybe like the Yuletide archive.)
I think a lot of people want to post their fic in a "clean" format, to stand alone, all by itself, and the only way to do that is mode-reply-- the fact that the comment form is more apparent in this format is a *side effect*, not the main reason they do it.
Basically, I think this is a conflict between LJ-as-fiction-archive and LJ-as-social-tool, which makes sense, because it wasn't ever meant to function as a fiction archive, so to make it work as one (ie, to get the story by itself on a page, like on any other fiction archive) you have to use workarounds.