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komponisto comments on Configurations and Amplitude - Less Wrong
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On the contrary, the karma system exists in order to make such "cracking down" unnecessary. If comments are downvoted sufficiently, they are hidden. This system is supposed to replace moderator action. If moderators are going to control content then we may as well not have voting.
I'm speaking up in this instance in particular because it seems to me that the only problem with the commenter in question is an intellectual one. The person isn't behaving badly in any sense other than arguing for an incorrect view and not noticing the higher level of their opponents (which after all can hardly be expected). It's exactly the kind of thing that downvotes alone are supposed to handle. We're not talking about a troll or spammer.
The reason it's important to make this distinction is that censoring for purely viewpoint-based reasons is a Rubicon that we need not cross.
(EDIT: I'll also point out, for clarity, that I myself have not responded to any of Monkeymind's comments. Being opposed to banning a commenter is not to be confused with being in favor of engaging them.)
There is a point at which not getting the message from karma is sufficiently damaging to the community that moderator action is called for.
Karma does not merely send messages to the user, but actually does the work of moderation by causing comments to be hidden.
On the sidebar too? That's the most aggravating issue, to me.
If that's the problem, shouldn't the solution be to implement comment-hiding on the sidebar?
Comments in the sidebar tend to be too new to have been voted below -3 or whatever the threshold is.
One could make the sidebar-threshold lower than the ordinary threshold....
True, but it would discriminate less well. It would hide many OK comments that happened to be downvoted once or twice.
Note that for this solution to be an argument against the banning solution, it would need to actually be implemented. Are you predicting that will happen?
I'm saying it ought to be done, if the problem is as described. Or, in other words, that I prefer such a solution over the alternative being proposed (moderator intervention to remove comments).
So you're not saying that you prefer no banning to banning (given whatever you predict will actually happen to the sidebar)?
The question isn't whether it "exists in order to" make cracking down unnecessary, or whether it "is supposed to" replace moderator action. The question is whether it actually does those things. And it's far from perfect at doing them. Yes, heavily downvoted comments take up a little less space in the recent comments and in the thread (at least if you have the willpower not to click on them! virtue of curiosity!) But they still take up some space; they take time to be downvoted enough to be hidden; I'm pretty sure they still appear in the sidebar; and the responses to them tend to appear in full, even though these too tend to be valueless. On a more abstract level, I'm worried that such comments influence a collective sense of what the current topic of the site is.
There are intellectual problems other than arguing for the wrong views, and ways of being ban-worthy other than being a troll or spammer. I haven't read most of the exchanges, but it was certainly my impression that Monkeymind has been communicating in ways that downvotes had made very clear weren't working for the audience, that he's been reasoning badly, and that he's been responding with hostility to downvotes. Are you sure that nobody has been banned for such behavior previously, and that a genuine Rubicon is being crossed here?
If the current system is so perfect that the comments being banned weren't attracting any attention anyway, is it really a big additional problem for them to be censored?