This discussion thread is insane.

Essentially, Eliezer gets negative karma for some of his comments (-13, -4, -12, -7) explaining why he thinks the new changes of karma rules are a good thing. To compare, even the obvious trolls usually don't get -13 comment karma.

What exactly is the problem? I don't think that for a regular commenter, having to pay 5 karma points for replying to a negatively voted comment is such a problem. Because you will do it only once in a while, right? Most of your comments will still be reactions to articles or to non-negatively voted comments, right? So what exactly is this problem, and why this overreaction? Certainly, there are situations where replying to a negatively voted comment is the right thing to do. But are they the exception, or the rule? Because the new algorithm does not prevent you from doing this; it only provides a trivial disincentive to do so.

What is happening here?

A few months ago LW needed an article to defend that some people here really have read the Sequences, and that recommending Sequences to someone is not an offense. What? How can this happen on a website which originally more or less was the Sequences? That seemed absurd to me, and so does this; as if both suggest that LW is becoming less what it was, and more a general discussion forum.

I suggest everyone to think for a moment about the fact that Eliezer somehow created this site, wrote a lot of content people consider useful, and made some decisions about the voting system, which together resulted in a website we like. So perhaps this is some Bayesian evidence that he knows what he is doing. And even in the case this would turn out to be a mistake, it would be easy to revert. Also, everyone here is completely free to create a competing x-rationalist website, if your worst nightmares about LW come true. (And then I want to see how you solve the problem of trolling there, when it suddenly becomes your responsibility.)

Recently we had also a few articles about how to make LW more popular; how to attract more readers and participants. Well, if that happens, we will need more strict moderation than we have now; otherwise we will drown in the noise. For instance, within this week we have a full screen of "Discussion" articles, some of them containing 86, 103, 191 comments. How many of those comments contain really useful information? What is your estimate, how many of that information will you remember after one week? Do you think that visiting LW once in a week is enough to deal with that amount of information? Or do you just ignore most of that? How big part of a week can you spend online reading LW, and still pretending you are being rational instead of procrastinating?

Perhaps LW needs more users, but it probably needs less text per week (certainly not more); both articles and comments. Less chatting, more thinking, better expressing ourselves. More moderation is needed. And most of you are not going to pay for human moderators, so I think you should just accept the existing rules, and their changes. Or you can always make a competing website, you know; but you won't do it, and you also know why.