online communities, being largely by and for geeks, dislike overt exclusionary tactics because it brings up painful associations. I think well established communities often have more to gain from elitism than they stand to lose.

These two statements are contradictory. Did you swap "gain" and "lose" in the second statement?

I personally haven't downvoted Tim, although I now feel like I ought to have, simply because it felt like bad etiquette to downvote someone else while in a sustained argument with them, even if you feel like they're engaging in bad reasoning. I should probably be more liberal with my downvotes in future than I have been.

If a person is making positive contributions to the board with some regularity though, I think it's worth having them around even if they are also frequently making negative contributions. At least the karma system gives people a mechanism to filter posts so that they can ignore the less worthwhile ones if they so choose.

Thanks. I'm not sure votes have that much to do with being right, though. My perception is more that people vote up things they like seeing - and vote down things they don't. It sometimes seems more like applause.

Look at his actual comments.

One solution is to try and convince people to downvote more aggressively.

Or at least to downvote established users more aggressively, given that new people have said they felt intimidated.

Alternatively just allow people to have an "ignored users" file. You can "click to ignore this user" on anybody that you find to be continuously less worthwhile on average.

Or, even better, you can apply a "handicap" to certain people. eg that you will only view comments by a certain person if the comment has been upvoted to at least 4 (or whatever).

Another solution is to change the karma system to remove the psychological obstacles that may keep people from downvoting. It feels a little mean to directly cause a comment to be filtered, even when it would probably improve the mean quality of discourse. It may be a little easier to express your opinion that a comment is not constructive, and have a less direct mechanism responsible for converting a consensus into moderation / karma penalty.

I do this by keeping kibitzing turned off most of the time, and always showing all comments regardless of karma. This won't work for everyone, but it works for me: I think my upvotes and downvotes are less biased this way.

Something I've thought about (in the context of other venues) is a rating system where vote-totals V are stored but not displayed. Instead what gets displayed is a ranking R, where R=f(V)... a comment utility function, of sorts. That way a single vote in isolation does not cause a state transition.

The same function can apply to user "scores." Which may reduce the inclination to stress about one's karma, if one is inclined to that.

To pick a simple example, suppose (R=V^.37). So 1 upvote gets R1, but a second upvote stays R1. The 3rd upvote gets R2; the 12th gets R3; the 30th gets R4. Downvoting an R2 comment might bring it to R1, or it might not. Eliezer is R68, Yvain is R45, Alicorn is R37, cousinit and weidai and annasolomon are all R30, I'm R13, and so forth.

(The specific function is just intended for illustrative purposes.)

The function needn't be symmetrical around zero... e.g., if R=(-1*ABS(V)^.37) when V<0, rankings go negative faster than they go positive.

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Along a different axis, it might be interesting to allow voters to be nymous... for example, a preferences setting along those lines, or a mechanism for storing notes along with votes if one chooses to, visible on a different channel. The idea being that you can provide more detailed feedback without cluttering the comment-channel with meta-discussions about other comments.

Another solution is to change the karma system to remove the psychological obstacles that may keep people from downvoting.

The way Hacker News does this is by not displaying comment scores that are below the filter threshold.

Eliezer has really got to do something about his fictional villains escaping into real life. First Clippy, now you too?

Posts in which people announce that they have changed their mind are usually upvoted

As a total newbie to this site, I applaud this sentiment, but have just gone through an experience where this has not, in fact, happened.

After immediately retracting my erroneous statement (and explaining exactly where and why I'd gone wrong), I continued to be hammered over arguments that I had not actually made. My retracted statements (which I've left in place, along with the edits explaining why they're wrong) stay just as down-voted as before...

My guess is that some of the older members of this site may realise that this is how it's supposed to work... but it's certainly not got through to us newbies yet ;)

Perhaps it should be added to the etiquette section in the newbie pages (eg the karma-section in the FAQ) ?

Translation: I haven't managed to convince you therefore you must be punished for your insolent behaviour of not being convinced by my arguments. I cannot walk away from this and leave you being wrong, you must profess to agree with me and if you are not rational enough to understand and accept logical arguments then you will be forced to profess agreement.

Who did you say hasn't learned how to lose?

I'm beginning to think that LW needs some better mechanism for dealing with the phenomenon of commenters who are polite, repetitive, immune to all correction, and consistently wrong about everything. I know people don't like it when I say this sort of thing, but seriously, people like that can lower the perceived quality of a whole website.

Warn, then ban the people involved.

If you decide that refusing to be convinced by evidence while also unable to convincingly counter it, and at the same time continuing to argue is bad form for the LW that you want to create, then stand by that decision and act on it.

Escalating punishment so someone "learns better" can work, but it requires real punishments, not symbolic ones. It's not clear to me that "plonking" would accomplish that.

And, of course, it has all the same problems that punishment-based behavior modification always has.

and a form letter reminder that self-consistency is not a virtue [..] making it clear that this community's respect is contingent on [..]

Is changing professed beliefs to something else without understanding / agreeing with the new position, but just doing it to gain community respect, a virtue?

Tim, and the rest of the class of commenters to which you refer, simply haven't learned how to lose.

Or still isn't convinced that he is wrong by the time you have passed your tolerance of explaining so you give up and decide he must be broken. Your proposed 'solution' is a hack so you can give up on convincing him but still have him act convinced for the benefit of appearances - maybe you are simply expecting far far too short inferential distances?

Therefore, I propose adding a "plonk" button on each comment.

From the username, I was expecting that the suggestion was going to be to say avada kedavra.

...self-consistency is not a virtue and a short guide to losing gracefully.

As long as you are no fooming FAI...