[META] Karma for last 30 days?

ArisKatsaris

[META] Karma for last 30 days? — LessWrong

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There could still be a problem if comment threads were sprinkled with huge contiguous swathes of hidden comments but does that actually happen?

It doesn't happen often, and so doesn't seem to be a particularly serious problem, but when it does it's really bad and the growth of such subthreads is very hard to stop.

I find the fact that even obviously aggressive and stupid stuff tends to be replied to in a polite and informative manner one of impressive things about LessWrong.

See the hidden comments to this post for an example. Just one user causes the damage directly, but that wouldn't happen to the extent it did without the polite and informative replies of others that fuel the conversation. Good contributions to bad conversations have negative net consequences.

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drethelin14y150

What are these negative net consequences? I enjoyed reading the good replies to that conversation. If you think the problem is the volume of conversation, then you have to explain why shutting down long "bad" conversations is worth losing shorter elegant responses to bad points.

Lesswrong puts a lot of stock in trying to fight human biases, which seems to me that saying "Don't do that!" with negative karma, and then rewarding people explaining why not, is exactly what we should be doing.

16drethelin14y

I actively disagree. You don't have to read those threads, but polite and measured responses to dumb ideas is one of the best ways to get yourself out of those ideas. We literally have dumb question threads for exactly that purpose. I also think it's good to encourage people to be patient and explain things. What "damage" was caused? A couple hundred posts about something that you don't have to read, but which could very well be useful to other people. You want to take a community of people that try to help others understand and instead silence all conversation along lines you disapprove of.

17[anonymous]14y

So there is a dark part of LW archives, looking upon which might very well destroy your soul. Fortunately, you won't accidentally see it -- you have to consciously choose to unhide the top-level comment. I suppose the damage is that people are unreasonably drawn to that kind of thing and they are also unreasonably drawn to replying to stupid stuff even when it's obviously hopeless ('someone is wrong on the internet' syndrome) so we have to protect them from wasting their time. I guess I dislike paternalism enough that such an argument doesn't convince me (and less seriously, if someone feels inclined to waste time while they're browsing the Internet, then they are already doomed anyway).

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