Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio

JoshuaZ

Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio — LessWrong

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(I still don't support karma penalties for replies in general.)

Reading troll comments has negative utility. Replying to a troll means causing that loss of utility to each reader who wants to read the reply (times the probability that they read the troll when reading the reply). Perhaps giving the reply rating the same rating as the troll would be a more equitable utility cost to karma.

More_Right12y20

Intelligently replying to trolls provides useful "negative intelligence." If someone has a witty counter-communication to a troll, I'd like to read it, the same way George Carlin slows down for auto wrecks. Of course, I'm kind of a procrastinator.

I know: A popup window could appear that asks [minutes spent replying to this comment] x [hourly rate you charge for work] x.016r = "[$###.##] is the money you lost telling us how to put down a troll. We know faster ways: don't feed them."

Of course, any response to a troll MIGHT mean that a res... (read more)

22common_law14y

That's exactly the kind of consideration that should lead people to downvote responses to "trolls." If you think someone is stupidly "feeding trolls," you should downvote them. It seems that E.Y. is miffed that readers aren't punishing troll feeders enough and that he's personally limited to a single downvote. As an end-run around this sad limitation, he seeks to multiply his downvote by 6 by instituting an automatic penalty for this class of downvotable comment. Nothing is so outrageously bad about troll feeding that it can't be controlled by the normal means of karma allocation. The bottom line is that readers simply don't mind troll feeding as much as E.Y. minds it; otherwise they'd penalize it more by downvotes. E.Y. is trying to become more of an autocrat.

6prase14y

As your comment stands now, you are just one point above the reply penalty threshold. You aren't a troll. I think it illustrates well that the problem with reply penalties isn't particularly strongly related to trolling. Since the penalty was introduced I have already twice refrained from answering a fairly resonable comment because the comment had less than -3 karma. I have seen no trollish comments for weeks.

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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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