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Vladimir_Nesov comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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I thought of that, but there doesn't appear to be a way of automatically separating these cases. Such questions could be edited-in in the downvoted comment itself, or included in a separately posted improved reframing of the content of the downvoted comment.
This would make bad threads of the currently typical form literally impossible to construct, so it's at least an interesting experiment. The successful outcome is for the downvoted conversations to peter out faster due to the inconvenience of having to find new starting points that are not replies to preceding conversations. I expect the worst that could happen is that instead of the nice orderly Big Bad Threads we'll have a deluge of bad comments scattered all over the place.
This variant of blocking only the downvoted user's comments seems better on most counts, as it doesn't have the downside of indiscriminate blocking which motivated the need for human judgment, it's automatic and so won't focus complaints as much, it seems to catch all the same threads that a human moderator might close, and it applies faster.
OK, thanks.
I suspect that if the goal is to make bad threads peter out faster, preventing all users from contributing to a bad thread will likely achieve that goal more readily than preventing one user from doing so.
We could even do that automatically if we wanted. For my own part I trust humans more than simple automatic pattern-matchers for this sort of thing, but if y'all prefer automatic pattern-matchers to diffuse the resulting complaints that's an option as well.
Of course, if we're OK with automatically blocking the downvoted user on the thread but not OK with automatically blocking other users on the thread, then an automatic branch-freeze won't work. This might be true if there are other as-yet-unstated goals being addressed, beyond the desire to end the thread itself.
Personally, I don't like the idea of letting everyone post on a thread except the person they are responding to; one-sided conversations make my teeth itch.