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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Moderation of apparent trolling - Less Wrong
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Comments (50)
I didn't ban them, and whichever mod did, I support them fully. See Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.
We need the following features on LW:
1) Banned comments no longer appear on user pages. Otherwise spammers have a motive to spam in order to steal pagerank.
2) When a comment is banned or goes to say -4 or below, but not when that comment is deleted, subcomments of it no longer appear in the Recent Comments feed. This will help ensure that stupid discussions ACTUALLY GET PRUNED rather than going on forever.
3) Automatic warning when a user posts a comment falling under 2.
4) Automatic warning when a user tries to delete a comment that already has subcomments, which people seem to do by accident a lot.
I'm not sure 1) is a good idea. As Paul Graham says here.
3 and 4 seem reasonable. 1 seems not so. Spam is dealt with pretty well, userpages have very low Google rankings, and external links already have nofollow tags so they don't add to page rank.
2 seems also problematic because there are conversation threads that start with highly downvoted comments but themselves contain useful remarks.
Agreed; the automatic warnings (as in (3)) should be enough to remind people that they might be posting in a stupid thread. (Maybe direct replies to a comment below -4 shouldn't appear in the Recent Comments feed, and perhaps direct replies to anything else posted by the same user within the same thread?)
I support (1), though. It doesn't seem unreasonable (let alone tyrannical) to allow moderators to delete comments and have them be actually deleted, or actually not-publicly-viewable at least; pretty much all forum software allows that.
I like the first half of that, but not the second. It is possible to say something stupid and something worthwhile in the same thread, and it would be unneccessarily confusing to have replies to non-downvoted comments not showing up.
The flipside is that the automatic warnings reduces the problems with 2. Once the warning occurs, the discussion can simply be moved to, well, the discussion area. (I'm not begging for new LW functionality, I just mean that when someone sees that waring, they can instead just start something in the discussion area and maybe leave a link in the thread to the new discussion)
That in itself is problematic - if they were barred from Recent Comments, maybe they'd be moved out from under downvoted comments.
By "moved", do you mean cut'n'paste, or actual moving?
I mean that people might continue the conversation elsewhere - there's no mechanism for users to move comments.
I agree with your point about 2. Perhaps subthreads with a comment average above a rather moderate limit should stay in recent comments.
Intuitively, I'd go with 1.5.
I wonder what the average karma for comments is in the past year or so. Now I wonder what the monthly average is-- that might be a way of getting a sketchy view of cultural changes in LW, though it wouldn't tell you whether it's a change in the quality of comments or the culture of voting.
Or the number of voters. People seem in general to be more likely to vote up than to vote down. If people act roughly like a biased coin then we should expect the average karma to go up as the number of new users increases. Although there are other complicating factors such as the fact that comments can accumulate karma over time. Does the system keep track of when a comment was upvoted or just that someone has been upvoted?
The way to avoid contributing pagerank is rel=nofollow.