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MBlume comments on Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism - Less Wrong
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Comments (179)
I don't think Byrnema deserves to be bleeding karma with every comment she makes. Her arguments do not hold water, but she is arguing honestly and in good faith. Burying the initial comment is plenty -- that's all the karma system is really supposed to do. Beyond that, there's no reason to continue to disincentivize further posting when she's arguing honestly and might actually learn something
I agree, have no idea why you were downvoted for saying this, and further observe that byrnema's karma is now 0 and can't descend further, so it doesn't even serve a punitive purpose (if anyone has such a petty motivation in mind).
(Not one of the downvoters.)
Byrnema needs to take a hint - at least that's why I downvote each time. I wouldn't be surprised if respondents also start getting downvoted - someone who replies to a comment already at -5 with a long, thought-out response, should not be surprised, IMO, if they get downvoted themselves.
The fact that an outcome is not, or should not be, surprising does not reliably correlate with the fact that the outcome is consistent with what we should like to see. Particularly given that people sometimes downvote for disagreement in the same way that they upvote for agreement, it doesn't seem at all appropriate to me that people responding to downvoted comments with replies that are themselves decently written and thoughtful should be downvoted too.
Unless it crosses over the line into feeding trolls. There are whole posts originally on OB that were taken over by Caledonian, because people just couldn't let him sink into the void. The point of voting something down to -5 is that it vanishes from the default eye - to put interesting discussions underneath it makes LW harder to filter well, as well as derailing the conversation.
Would it be hard to make something vanish based on an algorithm like this?
Would that be preferable? (Maybe disregard posts that have not been voted on?)
The thing is, byrnema hasn't acted like a troll in this thread. She made a single comment and since then has been responding to comments specifically directed towards her
My policy has been to mainly only respond to comments with questions since my views in this thread are unpopular. If someone does ask me a question, I perceive this as some interest in continuing the thread and I'll answer in good faith. But I do observe the karma of the comment asking the question. If its karma is positive, then this is evidence that continuing the thread is not generally unwelcome, and that the negative karma I'm receiving indicates disagreement with me rather than a desire for the thread to vanish. On the other hand, if we're both earning negative karma, this would be evidence that we're producing noise and I would try to end the discussion.
How about a bit of tolerating tolerance?
One, that post gives a position statement but no real argument. Two, actively encouraging fools can be worth punishing even if "failing to castigate" them is not. Three, replies to fools can be worth downvoting for being valueless even when they are not worth downvoting for the sake of incentives. (The reason stupid ideas get replies is not because replies to stupid ideas have the most value. The reason stupid ideas get replies is because people have things to say about them, and people feel an urge to reply when they have things to say. But we don't want this site to focus around stupid ideas. We want it to focus around smart ideas.)
It's easy when it's obvious. But what do you do with more murky cases, like PJ Eby's as-I-see-it woo? People who criticize do a public service by disambiguating whether an idea is stupid or not for those to whom it's not obvious, and you'd do well to encourage those people even if you yourself are certain enough.
Good point, I didn't think of that.
Thanks. It's interesting that by beginning and pursuing this thread, I've dropped 175 karma points over 3 days. Most of the points were lost immediately after posting the top comment when someone down-voted every comment I've made. (It's OK, someone once up-voted all my comments.) I'm now at -21, so the system is still keeping track of down votes.
OK, that's not good. I'll ping the LW people again for tools to prevent and reverse this.
Just as a data point, someone's doing it to me right now... on two page clicks, my karma dropped 3 points each time, from 948 to 942... 941... seems to have stabilized now. That probably means the person doing it had already done it through about 14 of my comments ago, since I saw 955 when I logged in, and that's still showing on the top-10 list... which means the culprit's last logon would be between 01 July 2009 04:05:22PM and 02 July 2009 05:38:46AM. (And all 14 appear to be down a point.)
(Edit to add: this is just to provide a data point for helping to match the behavior programmatically, not further advocacy for the feature or promoting a witch-hunt for the party in question.)
Oh, that one was probably me. I had missed some of your comments so was reading through them sequentially.
It seems like that's the Reddit-clone way of expressing "this person is a permanent bozo, their opinions are worse than noise and even their valid posts serve a dumb agenda". Reddit has software that fights mass downvoting, but IMO it's not evidence-free behavior, it ought to be taken into account - I suggest LW forbid it with the threat of a ban, but add a bozo button instead (something Reddit has long resisted). The action of this button could be as simple as knocking off a measured amount of karma.
Either that or instead have it increment a separate "N people have hit the Bozo Button for this user" counter.
Or, if you want it to also (or just) include it having a karma hit... make it actually carry a karma price for the user hitting the button too? ie, "I'm so sure that this user's a bozo that I am willing to sacrifice karma to say so, confident that I can earn it back far more easily than they can" or something like that? Since IF we wanted a "bozo button", we'd probably want it to count as something more extreme than simply hitting the downvote arrow. So we might also want to have a price attached to using it. At least, that's my initial thought here.
That is surprising. As of this post I'm at a karma of zero, having been downvoted 3 times and upvoted once. I was under the impression that zero was a limit.
To find out your actual karma, try to downvote someone. You won't be able to, but instead will get an error message telling you your karma.
I did that, and it tells me (0)!