This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Why is downvoting disabled, for how long has it been like this, and when will it be back?
The original purpose of downvoting was to allow community moderation. Here, "moderation" means two things: (1) Giving higher visibility to high-quality content. This functionality we still have, it's the upvotes. (2) Removing low-quality content. Comments with karma below -5 and their whole subthreads are collapsed by default. This is especially important when some newcomers start spamming LW with a lot of low-quality comments. It happened more frequently in the past when LW was more popular.
And the "community" aspect means that these d... (read more)