Proposal: Require text field or user comment when posting a story

<p>I am fairly new to lobste.rs so I don't have the full history on this comment. Has it been tried in the past and not worked?</p> <p><em>Please don't use this to promote the story, summarize the post, or explain why you posted it. See the guidelines below for more.</em></p> <p>I was wondering if it would be possible to <em>require</em> submitters include <em>some</em> text when posting new stories.</p> <p>It wouldn't need to be much, but I think it would be good if the user posting the story provided almost an editorial, or summary of their personal interpretation of the content. This would potentially spark more conversation as the poster would be posting a view or some context around how they found the link and why they think it's relevant to the lobste.rs community.</p> <p>I understand wanting to separate the story votes from the user commentary, could a user comment be <em>required</em> when posting a story instead? which is then added as first comment in the thread to maintain the separation between story a user comment?</p> <p>I think my reason for asking this is:</p> <ul> <li>There have been quite a few links posted recently without any real context</li> <li>Quite often stories are posted as links and no real conversation occurs</li> <li>There seems to be some level of link farming and copy/pasting of URLs based on rank from other similar sites without anything really added from the poster.</li> </ul> <p>I understand similar technical sites will inevitably have similar content, but requiring at least the original poster to read the article and provide detail, rather than blindly posting the link may help maintain a high level of quality as more users find the site. Hoping it will also assist in avoiding a 'post popular link from elsewhere, get karma' culture growing.</p>