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Alicorn comments on [META] Karma for last 30 days? - Less Wrong Discussion
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The site was seriously going to hell due to long troll-started threads and troll-feeding. It's not a good use-case when intelligent comments are hidden by default, either. 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.
I don't want to train readers to unhide things by default just because they might miss intelligent conversation in subthreads, I don't want intelligent conversation in places it's hidden by default from readers trusting the site mechanics, I want this site to stop feeding its trolls and would prefer a community solution rather than moderators wielding banhammers, and I want this site to focus its efforts positively rather than in amazing impressive refutations of bad ideas which is a primary failure mode of any intelligent Internet site. Threads with heavily downvoted ancestors should almost always not exist, because of their opportunity costs, the behaviors they reinforce, and other long-term consequences.
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.
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?
As someone who is a new user, I strongly agree with Alicorn.
More options don’t always make people better off, but seeing downvoted posts is an option that is actively useful for new users. One of my first comments initially got downvoted to -1, and on seeing this, I looked at other downvoted comments and was able to use what I learned to edit my post so it eventually got voted back into positive territory.
Mistake avoidance is worth learning and downvoted posts are helpful for this. I have benefited from looking at downvoted posts, and I have no reason to believe I’m atypical in this regard.
Negative examples, if I'm a newcomer, mean that I stop reading the site because the discussion is not consistently high-quality. And newbies looking at negative examples mean that elder posters feel obliged to respond to bad comments, just in case a newbie reads them and gets fooled; it makes it mentally harder to downvote and walk away. This is a change I would strongly consider in any case.