wedrifid comments on "Hide comments in downvoted threads" is now active - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Wei_Dai 05 October 2012 07:23AM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 05 October 2012 08:57:39AM -1 points [-]

This seems to be worth a discussion post since most people are probably still voting things to below -3 without knowing the new consequences of doing so.

There is a moderation mechanism designed to do X when users do Y. If this mechanism is good, we should keep it. If this mechanism is bad, we should remove or modify it. But we should not think about this mechanism while voting. That's gaming the mechanism.

  • Upvote = "LessWrong discussions should have more of this."

  • Downvote = "LessWrong discussions should have less of this."

That's all. There is nothing more to think about while voting. If you think there should be more things to consider while voting, please explain what and why.

I can imagine a situation where a stupid comment leads to smart discussion. How often? What is the conditional probability that a heavily downvoted comment will have a discussion worth watching? What are the benefits of watching that discussion in Recent Comments? What are the costs of watching an average discussion below a heavily downvoted comment in Recent Comments?

Comment author: wedrifid 05 October 2012 11:27:30AM *  11 points [-]

That's all. There is nothing more to think about while voting. If you think there should be more things to consider while voting, please explain what and why.

  • "This comment deserves to be at +5, not +40. The voting is totally out of proportion and I would prefer it were encouraged to a +39 degree than a +40 degree."
  • "The parent is at +8 while this comment is at +1. It is an undesirable thing for there to be such a difference in karma between these two comments because the reply is at least as good as its parent. I am going to upvote the reply."

I certainly support the heuristic: Upvote = "LessWrong discussions should have more of this." In fact, I've been advocating it for long enough that when I first advocating that interpretation it provoked controversy in as much as some considered it too cynical compared to more pure ideals along the lines of votes being obliged to mean "the point in this comment is rationally coherent". That said, it isn't quite the only consideration that it is reasonable to take in to account and I apply both of the heuristics mentioned above from time to time.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 October 2012 07:01:00PM *  2 points [-]

"This comment deserves to be at +5, not +40. The voting is totally out of proportion and I would prefer it were encouraged to a +39 degree than a +40 degree."

That's why I think upvotes and downvotes should be shown separately: that way it'd be clear whether +40 means +41 -1 or +140 -100.

Comment author: Exetera 06 October 2012 03:45:24AM *  0 points [-]

Replies are not necessarily as good or worse than their parents. A lot of the Sequences on this site might be construed as "replies" to more mainstream statistics, philosophy, or science, and yet I would certainly hope that the Sequence entries would get more upvotes than their parents.

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