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Jack comments on Proposed New Features for Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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Comments (169)
I'm voting against those two proposals. They'll have the effect of lowering the overall quality of comments.
My suggestion (if it is codable) is some icon next to the names of new users in their comments or some other innocuous identifying feature to let us identify them. The only problem we have with new users is not recognizing they are new. What we need is more information, not a watering down of our incentive structure. If people can easily identify new users they will avoid downvotes except for trolls and remember to be more welcoming and helpful. Moreover, new users should be defined by number of comments (30 or fewer?) not time since registration, since some will register but only later start commenting.
Seconded - this is a better mechanism. (It might be good to have a series of icons: up-to-10, up-to-30, up-to-100, and over-100, for example. The last one could be no icon, if you like.)
I disagree with this part -- I think people should get credit for time spent lurking.
I would agree in general, except remember we're not giving prizes for not being a new user. Someone who lurked for a year and then made a comment is exactly the sort of person we don't want to scare off by being too harsh the first time they comment.
Back in the OB days, I lurked for several months, reading through the archives, and my first comment was quite brutally shot down in one dismissive sentence by Eliezer. I didn't comment again for over a year.
Number of posts is, in my view, a far more reliable way to quantify a person's dedication to the community than time-spent-reading. It's far more likely for a long-time-reader commenting for their first time to be alienated or intimidated by downvotes and criticism than a short-time-reader who has been commenting prolifically.
How do we know they're lurking and not just dropping by every few months?