thomblake comments on On Comments, Voting, and Karma - Part I - Less Wrong

7 Post author: thomblake 07 April 2009 02:44AM

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Comment author: cousin_it 07 April 2009 03:08:59PM *  4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 07 April 2009 03:26:21PM 2 points [-]

The only way to improve the quality of discussions is to filter out the bozos. Don't moderate postings; moderate people.

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.

Comment author: ciphergoth 07 April 2009 04:03:27PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: GuySrinivasan 07 April 2009 04:50:27PM 2 points [-]

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.