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prase comments on Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio - Less Wrong Discussion
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This would be an improvement since then one's karma would still remain in principle obtainable by summing the karma of all one's comments and posts. But then, why have the arbitrary numbers -3 and -5? Wouldn't it be better if a reply to a negatively rated comment started at the same karma as the parent comment? Smooth rewarding schemes usually work better than those with thresholds and steps.
(I still don't support karma penalties for replies in general.)
Reading troll comments has negative utility. Replying to a troll means causing that loss of utility to each reader who wants to read the reply (times the probability that they read the troll when reading the reply). Perhaps giving the reply rating the same rating as the troll would be a more equitable utility cost to karma.
That's exactly the kind of consideration that should lead people to downvote responses to "trolls." If you think someone is stupidly "feeding trolls," you should downvote them.
It seems that E.Y. is miffed that readers aren't punishing troll feeders enough and that he's personally limited to a single downvote. As an end-run around this sad limitation, he seeks to multiply his downvote by 6 by instituting an automatic penalty for this class of downvotable comment.
Nothing is so outrageously bad about troll feeding that it can't be controlled by the normal means of karma allocation. The bottom line is that readers simply don't mind troll feeding as much as E.Y. minds it; otherwise they'd penalize it more by downvotes. E.Y. is trying to become more of an autocrat.
Thank you. The last paragraph perfectly articulates why I disagree with this feature.
It sounds like the real fix is a user-defined threshold. Anyone who only likes the highest rated comments can browse at +3 or whatever, and anyone who isn't bothered by negatively rated comments can browse at a lower threshold.
Isn't it already there?
Yep.
Thanks, I had only looked on the article's page for something like the "sort by" dropdown, but found the setting in the preferences.
(Now, if it also hid replies to downvoted comments in the Recent Comments page, it'd fully solve the ‘problem’, IMO.)
As your comment stands now, you are just one point above the reply penalty threshold. You aren't a troll. I think it illustrates well that the problem with reply penalties isn't particularly strongly related to trolling. Since the penalty was introduced I have already twice refrained from answering a fairly resonable comment because the comment had less than -3 karma. I have seen no trollish comments for weeks.
Also, the thresholds for "simple majoritarianism" are usually required to be much higher in order to obtain intelligent results. No thresholds should be possible to be reached by three people. Three people could be goons who are being paid to interfere with the LW forum. That then means that if people are disinterested, or those goons are "johnny on the spot" (the one likely characteristic of the real life agents provocateurs I've encountered), then legitimate karma is lost.
Of course, karma itself has been abused on this site (and all other karma-using sites), in my opinion. I really like the intuitions of Kevin Kelly, since they're highly emergence-optimizing, and often genius when it comes to forum design. :) Too bad too few programmers have implemented his well-spring of ideas!
There you go.
Intelligently replying to trolls provides useful "negative intelligence." If someone has a witty counter-communication to a troll, I'd like to read it, the same way George Carlin slows down for auto wrecks. Of course, I'm kind of a procrastinator.
I know: A popup window could appear that asks [minutes spent replying to this comment] x [hourly rate you charge for work] x.016r = "[$###.##] is the money you lost telling us how to put down a troll. We know faster ways: don't feed them."
Of course, any response to a troll MIGHT mean that a respected member of the community disagrees with the "valueless troll comment" assessment. --A great characteristic to have: one who selflessly provides protection against the LW community becoming an insular backwater of inbred thinking.
Our ideas need cross pollination! After all, "Humans are the sex organs of technology." -Kevin Kelly