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PhilGoetz comments on Proposed New Features for Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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Comments (169)
Both a "discussion" section, and an "off-topic" (explicitly non-LW-related content) section. Who knows, with an off-topic section, we might even turn out to be sociable.
No karma in the off-topic forum, though.
I'd throw in a vote against an explicitly non-LW related section - my gut feeling is that it would lower the level of discourse over time.
Maybe there should be a separate system for social vs. intellectual karma.
I'd prefer not to have it measure "social karma". Just interact with people and see who you like. It's nice to have a little bit of community-building, but the main measure of people's status on this site should still be their intellectual contributions.
The off-topic section is going to have to be moderated somehow.
It's conceivable that a separate karma system would help.
We could just cap karma for those comments at 0. So you can't get karma but you can still get punished for the dumb or obscene.
If it's combined with comments below some karma threshold are under a link [1], it might work.
It might be good to be able to set the different thresholds for the comments to posts and for the forum.
The only drawback I can see is the risk of malicious downvoting, but I don't have a feeling for how high that risk is.
[1] I'm not sure whether the things that look like links but don't refresh the whole page have another name.
Others can always upvote back to zero.
If comments are downvoted fast enough, they're unlikely to be seen by people who might want to upvote them.
I think there are enough of us who read practically every comment to counteract this sort of thing.
The best thing I've seen forum-wise has been strict moderators who also post. They're part of the community, so you actually care about whether or not you upset them. It takes a lot of work, but it's worth it.
Karma is for community evaluation of someone's contributions -- "is this person good to learn from?" Moderation is to punish dickish behavior, bad argumentative habits, etc. Moderation can have an element of authoritarian caprice, which is actually good for morale, like a well-loved grade-school teacher with her own strict, quirky rules.
Got that covered.
That last is very much a matter of taste. I can think of two blogs where the moderators talk a fair amount about their absolute power, and I find it makes the blogs less attractive for me. On the other hand, my taste may be unusual-- both of them have a lot of commenters.
Your taste may not be that unusual - I agree with you. Quirky, strict, authoritarian caprice annoyed me in grade school, and still does.
I'd propose retaining the upvote/downvote system on individual posts, but not having it affect commenters' karma.
Why? The off-topic section is off-topic. You can't moderate it for topic, by definition.
It doesn't have to be.
You're right, literally speaking, but I think that there's enough evidence of the forces of entropy hammering unmoderated open forums online that if we want it to be useful, it will need moderation.
Works for me, but my views on this are much more permissive than the community at large