If I'm hearing you correctly, the plan to limit trolls is push them to make fewer posts inside the auto-hidden areas and more posts outside of the auto-hidden areas?

Well, uh, I suppose that's one way to deal with trolls.

PMd explanations are not publicly visible, so they don't help others who read the thread and make the same mistake as the downvoted poster. They can't be upvoted by others, which removes a big (in my experience) incentive to post the explanations.

The site was seriously going to hell due to long troll-started threads and troll-feeding.

I really don't see this. It looks like the main clause of decline is that spontaneous top-level postings are not enough to make up for the loss of the enormous subsidy of a good writer posting as a full-time job. 3 examples of hellish troll-feeding would be nice.

It may be worth considering whether your intuitions and priors about how serious a problem trolling is is at odds with the impression of the rest of the community. Or, it may be that most of the people you have attracted here are somewhat more tolerant of some amount of trolling. It seems at least from the general voting in this thread that most of the community is not happy with even this change, let alone the other changes you are suggesting.

the next step will be to make it impossible for users less than three months old (or with less than 1000 karma or something) to see comments under -3 at all.

I am vehemently opposed to this. If the problem is out-of-control threads, make the newbies unable to reply to downvoted comments - don't make them unable to look at them! Don't they need negative examples too?

Responding to the edit:

What are these opportunity costs, what behaviors are they reinforcing, and what are the long-term consequences you are trying to avoid?

When I respond to someone who is getting downvoted, do you think I'm likely to have been spending my time doing something better? I can't contribute usefully to a conversation about decision theory, but I can talk about plenty of other things to other people. Exactly what opportunities are being wasted, and why are they all of a sudden being wasted now it's not whatever golden age there was before the site was going to hell? Are you trying to say intelligent posters are not posting because somewhere else in some comment thread some idiot is being talked to?

Is the end goal of this simply to have any conversation stop as soon as something gets voted to -3? Really? Three random people or 1 person with 2 sockpuppets can just end a discussion? I don't understand why you can't trust people to have conversations but you can trust them to downvote wisely.

There's a message warning about the impending karma loss that pops up before posting, right? Maybe the message alone would do the trick if it warned people that their contribution is going to be buried by default, informed them of the negative consequences of replying to crap and implored them to reconsider?

And I now see that contrary to the feature request, it's only asking for 5 karma for immediate descendants, not anywhere in the chain, so I shall go now and ask that to be updated.

Please clarify this for me. If I am reading correctly it indicates that currently only the immediate descendent is punished but that your orders are that all descendents of that comment shall be punished too. If so that strikes me as ridiculously shortsighted. This makes us obliged to go through the entire ancestor history of a comment every time we wish to make a reply if we wish to avoid being arbitrarily punished.

If this particular effort proves insufficient, the next step will be to make it impossible for users less than three months old (or with less than 1000 karma or something) to see comments under -3 at all.

Eliezer, you should stop personally exercising your power over the forum. Your interventions are reactionary, short sighted, tend to do more harm than good and don't adequately incorporate feedback received. Consider telling someone else at SingInst what your desired outcome is and ask them to come up with a temperate, strategically sane solution that doesn't make you look silly.

The site was seriously going to hell due to long troll-started threads and troll-feeding.

Can you give a few examples of that that you think are are particularly bad?

I don't want to train readers to unhide things by default just because they might miss intelligent conversation in subthreads

Another way of doing this would be a five second delay to unhide hidden comments. Waiting isn't fun and it prevents hyperbolic discounting from magnifying the positive reinforcement of reading something that someone doesn't want you to read.

And I now see that contrary to the feature request, it's only asking for 5 karma for immediate descendants, not anywhere in the chain, so I shall go now and ask that to be updated.

Can you explain what this would accomplish at all? I'm not seeing anything that it accomplishes. If anything, it actively makes the problem of good threads that happen to have been started in a negatively downvoted comment worse. Moreover, it would lead to the situation where people are replying to a long-thread and then get a karma hit because it happens that way back up in the thread the initial bit got downvoted. That means that among other things, replying to threads where one is looking at single post or with a permalink becomes essentially a karma trap. This accomplishes nothing. The primary problem with trolling is that it clogs up the recent comments sections. High quality comments downthread of a bad comment don't have this problem. This seems like an even worse idea than the already implemented change by such an order of magntude that part of me is wondering if this is a deliberate use of the Dark Arts to make the current change more palatable in comparison.

And I now see that contrary to the feature request, it's only asking for 5 karma for immediate descendants, not anywhere in the chain, so I shall go now and ask that to be updated.

A lot of discussion happens without much use of the context in which it started. If a good conversation starts under (perhaps 4 levels lower than) a comment that will in the future sink to -3 or lower, that stops the conversation, without any convenient way of extracting it outside that thread. I don't believe the conversation should be discouraged in such cases. (Do you think it should? I expect it would be very inconvenient and annoying without the additional subthread-extraction feature.)

On the other hand, typical clueless-feeding conversations are mostly back-and-forth between a user in a failure mode and those who reply to them directly. The clueless normally gets downvoted, but those who reply to them are not, and the measure of Karma-punishing those who directly reply to downvoted comments would address that.

Let's say this gets downvoted

[citation needed]

Moderators that discuss every decision with the community and only act when they've built consensus fail prey to vocal minorities, e.g., Wikipedia. Then they tend to stagnate.

Yes, discussing every decision with the community is probably a bad idea. But that doesn't mean that specific, large scale changes shouldn't be discussed.

Instead of trying to build a consensus, Eliezer could have asked the community "Here are the consequences I intend/foresee with this change. Are there any important ones I may have overlooked?", which has no obvious downsides that I can see, other than the opportunity cost of writing out the question.

What are these negative net consequences? I enjoyed reading the good replies to that conversation. If you think the problem is the volume of conversation, then you have to explain why shutting down long "bad" conversations is worth losing shorter elegant responses to bad points.

Lesswrong puts a lot of stock in trying to fight human biases, which seems to me that saying "Don't do that!" with negative karma, and then rewarding people explaining why not, is exactly what we should be doing.

I actively disagree. You don't have to read those threads, but polite and measured responses to dumb ideas is one of the best ways to get yourself out of those ideas. We literally have dumb question threads for exactly that purpose. I also think it's good to encourage people to be patient and explain things. What "damage" was caused? A couple hundred posts about something that you don't have to read, but which could very well be useful to other people.

You want to take a community of people that try to help others understand and instead silence all conversation along lines you disapprove of.

See the hidden comments to this post for an example. Just one user causes the damage directly, but that wouldn't happen to the extent it did without the polite and informative replies of others that fuel the conversation. Good contributions to bad conversations have negative net consequences.

So there is a dark part of LW archives, looking upon which might very well destroy your soul. Fortunately, you won't accidentally see it -- you have to consciously choose to unhide the top-level comment. I suppose the damage is that people are unreasonably drawn to that kind of thing and they are also unreasonably drawn to replying to stupid stuff even when it's obviously hopeless ('someone is wrong on the internet' syndrome) so we have to protect them from wasting their time. I guess I dislike paternalism enough that such an argument doesn't convince me (and less seriously, if someone feels inclined to waste time while they're browsing the Internet, then they are already doomed anyway).

True, though I hoped that this forum would not demand as high a level of political correctness. Especially given that there is a simple technical solution.

Censoring trolls seems to be the point, not censoring discussions of potentially controversial comments left by the respected forum regulars.

Well then impress upon Eliezer how much of an idiot he is, Vladimir, instead of getting snippy with army1987. Eliezer is the one who's using the word so much, Vladimir.

If it fits so poorly, why is it the definition used by the site?