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cousin_it comments on On Comments, Voting, and Karma - Part I - Less Wrong
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Comments (47)
I don't think there's enough downvoting going on - in particular, comments of such low quality that I would not wish them to insult the eyes of new users judging us, are not successfully voted down to -4 and hidden. It seems we're wandering into a norm where 0 is insult enough, -1 is terrible, -4 is hardly imaginable.
Those of you who are not familiar with the literature on online communities should bear in mind that online communities die primarily as a result of failing to solve the problem of quality control, and that refusing to accept the unfortunate necessity of quality control is a primary reason. So there are broken windows and they attract hoodlums, and the higher-quality recruits encountering the community for the first time decide to go elsewhere. And this has happened over and over again since before the days of the Eternal September.
Here, the quality control is downvoting, but people are refusing to use it. It has turned into something awful, horrible, unspeakable, a punch in the nose that requires a full-blown court drama. No community can defend its quality standards in such a fashion.
Downvoting really should not be that awful. And so I hope that starting all comments out at 0 will encourage more downvoting, which will make a score of -1 seem less awful, which will encourage even more downvoting, and so LW will not go the way of so many other online communities that tried to be nice and refused to defend their quality standards.
The programming language community blog Lambda the Ultimate had similar problems some years ago and seems to have emerged successful. Guess having a benevolent dictator editor is important. Here's the relevant discussion from 2006. My own two cents there, that I still stand by today:
The only way to improve the quality of discussions is to filter out the bozos. Don't moderate postings; moderate people.
For me, read-only access to "old LtU" would be more pleasant than read-write access to "new LtU". In other words: I don't think bans are "extreme", my vote is for a lot more bans, and I wouldn't mind being banned myself if this improves the signal-to-noise ratio.
Edit: it seems someone took my words to heart and started downvoting my whole comment history without explanation. Nice! Sadly I can't tell if it's happening to anyone else.
I disagree. Most people who make high-quality comments also make a large number of low-quality comments. Filtering out bad comments is essential if we want the good ones to float to the top.
Sure, but usually it's only a very few folk who make actively damaging comments - comments that for no reward absorb more time and energy from the community than just the time to read them because of the responses they attract.
I'd like to filter out actively damaging comments and the large number of low-quality comments. Banning only people will not help with that.
It happens to me regularly - my karma drops by roughly the number of comments I've posted since the last time it happened. It's annoying, but since my overall karma still grows, it's clearly noise.
Also, it's possible the same person is downvoting everybody in this thread; I had a drop of about 10 points today. (I skipped posting any comments this weekend, so my overall comment rate has gotten kind of low lately.)
Perhaps someone is just trying to "win" at karma?
I just lost 20 points in half an hour.
A similar thing happened to me a while back.
Woah, I also lost 20 in half an hour. Doesn't look like a coincidence.
I've not only noticed this happening to me (which is to be expected), but to a number of other people, most especially those who have seemingly earned the dislike of the local Powers That Be.
I'm considering stepping in to correct such injustices, but thus far my desire to vote up/down based solely on individual merit has prevented me. If it keeps up, let us know, and I'll start changing my strategy.
Don't. It probably happens to people who like the local Powers That Be, too. My karma dropped 17 points in 10 minutes some days ago, for no reason I was aware of. Karma doesn't matter all that much, and not acting like power-struggling children about karma does matter. Even if there is systematic injustice in some particular direction, there's better information-flow in pointing out the distortion and letting people consciously realize that karma is unreliable in such-and-such a way, than in adding further information-poor voting to try to compensate.
If somebody went to your userpage and then sequentially voted down all your comments in a short period of time based on nothing related to quality control (which is probably what happened here if the downvotes were by one person), the system should be able to spot that sort of abuse and ban the user or take other action.
If that was automatic, it would be a problem for me. I often go back through the recent comments listing and do a flurry of quality-control voting; otherwise, comments on older posts slip through the cracks.
I worry that some people may hold conflicting views on what the comments are for.
Relevant communication must not be punished. There is no way to support a conversation without these communication comments that are not intended to hold generally appreciated pearls of wisdom in them.
I think this better reflects conflicting views on what voting is for. I don't vote something down as punishment; I vote it down because I don't think it's interesting enough to belong at the top of the page.
If posting a certain kind of comments results in expected decrease in karma, people will avoid doing that, so there is an inseparable component of punishment. What you say would only work if there were two separate comment ratings, one for other readers, and one for the writer. Essentially, the hard/soft voting distinction developed to play this role.
I suppose that's true if people would really take a decrease in karma as a reason not to post a comment.
If people are doing that, they probably should be punished for it.
I'll see about adding the ability to vote down comments that weren't posted for not being posted.
You are evil.
I said userpage, not recent comments. If you don't often view all comments of just a single user and then issue 20 or more downvotes in quick succession, I wasn't suggesting anything that would affect you. There are lots of abuses that can't easily be caught, but abuse like I've outlined, which based on comments here has occurred a few times recently, should be easy to catch.