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Emile comments on LessWrong Boo Vote (Stochastic Downvoting) - Less Wrong
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Comments (38)
How about two standards?
For top-level comments, downvote mercilessly, as per Eliezer's recommendations, so readers with little time can quickly find the most interesting stuff.
For comments-on-comments (all the little threads), be more lenient -- downvote only trollish, rude or stupid comments. "Sorting by votes" is less useful in threads anyway. That would make them a better place for chit-chat, questions, etc.
I would base the division on length -- long comments should be downvoted mercilessly, as they take up more time and more screen real estate -- but this makes sense too.
A broad community norm against long comments is probably a good idea, anyway. The vast majority of long comments are likely going to be either off-topic, a good idea expressed too verbosely, or something with enough length and quality that it probably should have been a full post.
I'm pleased to hear someone say that. I worry that my comments are too short, but I do often put work into brevity.
I have the opposite intuition. I prefer comments that present a full argument, preferably with links and/or references - those are the ones I tend to upvote. Long comments that drift off-topic, I downvote for being off-topic, not for being long.
I think you misunderstand the point. Useless comments should be downvoted more readily the longer they are as that means they are a less efficient use of pixels. Shorter comments don't need to be downvoted as much even if they're not the best since they're not polluting the screen as much. In general, the best comments will take up some space but I take it there is always some length at which even a helpful comment deserves to be downvoted.
Agreed, I thought about adding that as a second alternative, but skipped it to prevent my comment from getting too long ;-)
Length isn't as much of a problem when the discussion has turned into a back-and forth between two commenters, or in a reply to a question, but still, overall, we should discourage a long, rambling style.
I like this as a general improvement, but it doesn't seem to solve the problem. The kind of trolls that write filler comments and nothing else will just shift in the comment-on-comment niche, making it uncomfortable. The point is that ultimately, there needs to be some kind of moderation of people.
I endorse this idea strenuously. Aggressive housekeeping on all comments will suppress participation, cf. Alicorn's post, but this seems to be an excellent compromise.