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JoshuaZ comments on Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio - Less Wrong
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Comments (231)
The proposals I have (not all of which are mutually exclusive) are :
Make comments within highly downvoted subthreads not appear on recent comments. Since the main problem with trolling is drowning out of recent comments, this will solve many of the issues. Moreover, it will discourage continued replies.
Have a separate section of the website where threads can be moved to or have a link to continue to. This section would have its own recent changes section. Moderators could move threads there or make it so that replies went to that section, and would be used for subthreads that are fairly downvoted. This has the advantage of quarantining the worst threads. This is a variation of an old system used at The Panda's Thumb which works well for that website.
Use the -5 penalty system but adjust either the trigger level or the penalty size. It isn't obvious that -3 and -5 are the best values for such a system if it is a good idea. The fact is that -3 isn't that negative as comment scores go, so something like -3 can be obtained without saying that much about a comment's quality. -5 and -5 or or -5 and -1 may be better values. The second would offer softer discouragement for more severe comments.
Use the penalty system but have karma penalties be restored if the comment it replies to is subsequently voted up more. This may be slightly more technically advanced, but this will help encourage people to speak out when they think a comment is unfairly downvoted.
Downvoted for putting more than one suggestion in a single comment.
Punish me for this anti-social act if you must, but as one of the dudes who tries to act after reading these suggestions (and tries hard to discount his own opinion and be guided by the community) this practice makes it much harder for me to judge community support for ideas. Does your comment having a score of 10 suggest 2.5 points per suggestion? ~10 points per suggestion? 15 points each for 3 of your suggestions and --35 for one of them (and which one is the -35?)?
Can we please adopt a community norm of atomicity in suggestions?
Sorry, yes, that was obviously a bad action on my part. (Kindly's highly upvoted comment suggests that #1 is of the four the only one of these that people seem to like.)
I think #1 is the way to go here, and the only method that will have any effect in most cases.
As long as there is a separate "uncensored" recent comments page where they still show up.
The point is to get people to stop replying to those threads.
Although if one did have such a separate recent comments page, people who cared more about the signal/noise ratio could simply not read the full comment page.
I agree that if I try to extract coherent beliefs from Eliezer's claim, particularly the claim that people are fleeing the invisible threads, this is what I must conclude.
But I'm not sure I should try to extract coherent beliefs from Eliezer's claims. Do you directly claim this? Do you agree with his claim that trolling has increased in recent months? Do you think invisible comments are a good proxy for trolls?
I stopped looking at recent comments long ago for reasons of volume. I think it keeps large threads going. But I think large threads tend to be equally worthless, regardless of average karma or karma of the initial comment.
I guess that I agree with Eliezer that the signal to noise ratio is not as good as it used to be, at least not as good as when I first joined here. But I'm not that highly active a user, and my karma is only around 9000, so my impression may not be that important in this context.
9000 is more karma than I have... and I've been here since the beginning! (I mostly write comments rather than posts, though, and you get more karma from posts, especially posts to Main.)