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wedrifid comments on "Hide comments in downvoted threads" is now active - Less Wrong
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This opens up a new aspect of downvoting, which I've just now tried out, and will describe in the interest of full disclosure: you can "swim up" the chain of comment parents until you find one that is at -3, and by downvoting that cause the entire downthread discussion to be effectively censored.
Swimming upthread is something I do quite often in the course of trying to understand what sparked a particular controversy - I'm often dismayed to see that these are tangents that had nothing to do with the original question being investigated and not a whole lot to do with rationality.
This comment by Wei Dai was the trigger for my looking to use this tactic (it felt like it belonged in a low-overall-value discussion of the kind I'd like to see less of), showing up at the top of Recent comments.
No less than eight levels above was this comment by wedrifid, sitting at -3, with a total of 38 children comments. Downvoting it (without the slightest qualm, given the first non-quoted words were a rhetorical "How dare you" that I strongly prefer not to see around here) did in fact cause Wei Dai's comment to disappear from Recent. (Here's the starting point of the whole subthread.)
So, that's one (possibly unexpected) consequence of the new rule. Good? Bad? I haven't formed an opinion yet.
(Some disclaimers: I have no particular antipathy toward either Wei Dai or wedrifid, nor did I allow myself to develop a particular attachment to either "side" in that particular controversy, given that the appearance of "sides" at all didn't strike me as particularly productive. I'm aware that my commenting on this may negate the censorship consequences on this particular discussion, but it seemed to me that bringing this out in the open had greater expected value than just quietly censoring one subthread and retaining the power to do it again on other occasions.)
Not productive in the slightest. In fact I would happily downvote my own comment (despite reflectively endorsing it) just to hide the entire pointless load of tripe.
Yep, there's some of my own comments I wish I could downvote for the same reason.
Really? This is a little surprising but only in a purely logistical sense. You don't tend to be in situations where that can be effective. Voting on your comments is more extreme than with most so whenever your comments form part of an unproductive conversation they already tend to be downvoted way below the threshold where less prominent users who draw less attention may only have reached -2 or -3. For this reason I suspect the current implementation handles this for you with requiring your noble self-sacrifice.
(Pardon me if I'm just being too literal and you meant "would wish to be able to downvote". The prominence and popularization factor is just what popped into my head following the "that would be redundant" thought.)
Me too. And that was even a feature of the system, once upon a time. But I'm not bitter, no.
This is likely the point of the rule: to discourage otherwise-high-quality comments that might inspire a wave of crappy ones.
The problem seemed to be that a crappy comment can sometimes inspire a wave of good comments.