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RichardKennaway comments on 6 Tips for Productive Arguments - Less Wrong
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Comments (121)
I agree that downvoting new people is a bad idea - and every comment in the Welcome Thread should get a load of karma.
However, I think people should aggressively downvote - at the very least a couple of comments per page.
If we don't downvote, comments on average get positive karma - which makes people post them more and more. A few 0 karma comments is a small price to pay if there's a high chance of positive karma.
However, we don't want these posts. They clutter LW, increasing noise. The reason we read forums rather than random letter sequences is because forums filter for strings that have useful semantic content; downvoting inane or uninsightful comments increases this filtering effect. I'd much rather spent a short period of time reading only high quality comments than spend longer reading worse comments.
Worse, it can often be hard to distinguish between a good comment on a topic you don't understand and a bad one. Yet I get much more value spending time reading the good one, which might educate me, than the bad one, which might confuse me - especially if I have trouble distinguishing experts.
Downvotes provide the sting of (variable) negative reinforcement. In the long run, well kept gardens die by pacificism.
Anyone who posts in order to get karma either overvalues karma or undervalues their time. If their time really is worth so little, they probably can't produce karma-worthy comments anyway.
"If their time really is worth so little, they probably can't produce karma-worthy comments anyway."
I can throw out a quick comment in 2 minutes. I enjoy writing quick comments, because I like talking about myself. I expect a lot of people like talking about themselves, given various social conventions and media presentations.
I almost never see a comment of mine voted down unless it's actively disagreeable (BTW, cryonics is a scam!), attempting to appeal to humour (you lot seriously cannot take a joke), or actively insulting (I like my karma enough not to give an example :P)
I'd idly estimate that I average about +1 karma per post. Basically, they're a waste of time.
I have over 1,000 karma.
So, the community consensus is that I'm a worthwhile contributor, despite the vast majority of my comments being more or less a waste of time. Specifically, I'm worthwhile because I'm prolific.
(Of course, if I cared about milking karma, I'd put this time in to writing a couple well-researched main posts and earn 100+ karma from an hour of work, instead of ~30/hour contributing a two-line comment here and there.)