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.
(It's much better now that all of the bad comments are removed either by the author or by moderators, so you are not looking at the problem as it presents itself in the wild, but you can imagine based on the number of downvotes.)
I don't think LW should be used for arguing with people who make too many errors. It's a different kind of activity completely from trying to obtain a better understanding of what constitutes good thinking.
Has anyone yet mentioned or reported that for the last couple days, the "karma for last 30 days" is showing zero for everyone? And that we no longer can see the top contributors for the last 30 days either?
Do we have an explanation or estimation for a bugfix on this?