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handoflixue comments on 6 Tips for Productive Arguments - Less Wrong
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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.
"Downvotes provide the sting of (variable) negative reinforcement."
"My [...friend...] was highly turned off by Less Wrong when the first comment he made was voted down."
It seems to me that we want to cull people who repeatedly make poor comments, and who register an account just to make a single trolling remark (i.e. evading the first criteria via multiple accounts). We do not want to cull new users who have not yet adapted to the cultural standards of LessWrong, or who happen to have simply hit on one of the culture's sore spots.
If nothing else, the idea that this community doesn't have blind spots and biases from being a relatively closed culture is absurd. Of course we have biases, and we want new members because they're more likely to question those biases. We don't want a mindless rehashing of the same old arguments again and again, but that initial down vote can be a large disincentive to wield so casually.
Of course, solving this is trickier than identifying it! A few random ideas:
Mark anyone who registered less than a week ago, or with less than 5 comments, with a small "NEWBIE" icon (ideally something less offensive than actually saying "NEWBIE"). Also helps distinguish a fresh troll account from a regular poster who happens to have said something controversial.
Someone's first few posts are "protected" and only show positive karma, unless the user goes beneath a certain threshold (say, -10 total karma across all their posts). This allows "troll accounts" to quickly be shut down, and only shields someone's initial foray (and they'll still be met with rebuttal comments)
There's probably other options, but it seems that it would be beneficial to protect a user's initial foray, while still leaving the community to defend itself from longer-term threats.
How about redirecting users to the latest Welcome thread when they register, and encouraging them to post there? Such posts are usually quickly uploaded to half-a-dozen or thereabouts.
I definitely think the "Welcome" threads could do with more prominence. That said, I'm loathe to do introductions myself; I'd far rather just jump in to discussing things and let people learn about me from my ideas. I'd expect plenty of other people here have a similar urge to respond to a specific point, before investing themselves in introductions and community-building / social activities.