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Bugmaster comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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Comments (1742)
Let's say that I post comment B in response to comment A. Comment A has 0 karma, so I suffer no karma penalty. Five minutes afterward, however, various other users downvote comment A to -5. Would I be karma-taxed retroactively ? How would this affect comment B's rating ? If the answers are "no" and "it wouldn't", that could explain the present situation.
I wonder if there can be a race condition, when a comment is started before its parent is downvoted to -3, but submitted after, resulting in an unexpected karma burn.
Yes. That happened to me yesterday; not only does it produce karma loss, but the warning message doesn't pop up.
I guess a workaround would be to open the parent in another window and check its vote before hitting "comment"... And if it is already at -2, maybe think a bit first :)
I hope that this half-assed mis-implementation gets fixed eventually. Incidentally, my earlier suggestion to only apply karma burn when the offending comment's author has negative monthly karma would largely take care of the race condition as well, if the warning message pops up based on the monthly karma. Something along the lines of "do you really think it's a good idea to reply to someone with negative karma?"
Yeah, that sounds like a much better solution than what we've got. Your workaround should also work -- and would be made a bit more safe by applying the reversible vote trick, though that's a borderline exploit -- but I wouldn't be surprised to find other issues; the different parts of the karma system here don't always synchronize perfectly.
A related note: You can sometimes get around the karma burn by upvoting a comment that's at -3, commenting, and then reversing your upvote after.
"No" and "It wouldn't", indeed. But heritable penalties once something does go to -3 would prevent users with zero or lower karma from replying further, thus preventing the current thread from happening again.
I don't think "preventing the current thread from happening again" is anywhere near an important enough goal to justify heritable karma penalties -- let alone retroactive ones.
I've not seen retroactive penalties proposed anywhere; the current system warns you when you start if a penalty applies for making a comment, presumably that wouldn't change.
Yep. Nobody was proposing retroactive.
An alternative possibility, that may have the same or a similar effect, is to auto-close the children of heavily downvoted posts when they appear on the "Recent Comments" window. Adding an extra step to reply to such a post will tend to reduce the number of replies that is gets, and will clearly signal to the reader that the post is, in fact, the child of a heavily downvoted post.
I have no idea if this possibility will be better or worse than the heritable penalties (nor, for that matter, which option would be easier to implement).
Could we change the "Recent Comments" box to say "Recent Threads", instead, with a count of updated comments, net karma, and most recent poster for each thread as usual ? For example, something like this:
EliezerYudkowsky on Meta-note: Right now... by EliezerYudkowsky on The Worst Argument In The World | 7k, 2 new
Mugbuster on You all smell... by Obvious_Troll on The Worst Argument In The World | -15k, 18 new
This tells me that Eliezer commented on a thread that he started, and the thread is generally positively rated, though low-volume, so I might click it. On the other hand, Mugbuster commented on a high-volume thread that has cumulative -15 karma, which means that it's probably a trolling thread, and I should stay out of it.
That one's in progress, I think.
Also, to reply to a comment elsewhere in thread, obviously penalties are not going to be charged retrospectively if an ancestor later goes to -3. Nobody has proposed this. Navigating the LW rules is not intended to require precognition.
Well, it was required when (negative) karma for Main articles increased tenfold.
Yes, or when downvotes were limited without warning.