Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio

JoshuaZ

The recent implementation of a -5 karma penalty for replying to comments that are at -3 or below has clearly met with some disagreement and controversy. See http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/eb9/meta_karma_for_last_30_days/7aon . However, at the same time, it seems that Eliezer's observation that trolling and related problems have over time gotten worse here may be correct. It may be that this an inevitable consequence of growth, but it may be that it can be handled or reduced with some solution or set of solutions. I'm starting this discussion thread for people to propose possible solutions. To minimize anchoring bias and related problems, I'm not going to include my ideas in this header but in a comment below. People should think about the problem before reading proposed solutions (again to minimize anchoring issues).

Instead of trying to stop noise, you can filter it. Instead of designing to prevent errors, you can design to be robust to them.

I'll repeat something I said in the other thread:

To the extent that all the griping over signal to noise is about a desire to control what you see, and not control what others see or say, there are decades old solutions to discussion filtering. The fancy shmancy Web has been a marked deevolution of capabilities in this regard. It's pitiful. No web discussion forum I know of has filtering capabilities even in the ball park of Usenet, which was available in the 80s. Pitiful.

I also suggest that any solution which is not fundamentally about user customization is a failure under my assumption above, because one man's noise is another man's signal.

No web discussion forum I know of has filtering capabilities even in the ball park of Usenet, which was available in the 80s. Pitiful.

I strongly share your opinion on this. LW is actually one of the better fora I've come across in terms of filtering, and it still is fairly primitive. (Due to the steady improvement of this forum based on some of the suggestions that I've seen here, I don't want to be too harsh.)

It might be a good idea to increase comment-ranking values for people who turn on anti-kibbitzing. (I'm sure other people have suggested this, so... (read more)

40moridinamael14y

You've made me understand the root of one of my own dissatisfactions with the current system. If I look through my post history and roughly group my posts into bins based on how I would summarize them, this is what I see: * Silly posts in the HP:MOR threads: ~ +20 karma * Posts of mine having little content except to express agreement with other high-karma posts: ~ +10 karma * Important information or technical corrections in serious discussions: ~ +1 karma * Posts which I try to say something technical which I retrospectively realize were poorly worded but could have been clarified if someone pointed out an issue instead of just downvoting: ~ -5 karma Perhaps I exaggerate slightly but my point is that if I were to formulate a posting strategy aimed at obtaining karma, then I would avoid saying anything technical or discussing anything serious and stick to applause lights and fluff. On top of this, I tend to watch how the karma of my most recent comments behaves, and so I notice that, for example, a comment might have +5 upvotes and -3 downvotes, with no replies. This is just baffling to me. Was there something wrong with the post that three people noticed? Were the three separate things wrong with it? Was it just a response to the tone? What about the upvotes, is it being upvoted because of the witticism at the end, or because of the technical content in the middle? My point is something like Slashdot has a system where things are voted "funny" or "insightful" would be infinitely more useful.

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Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio

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Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio

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