Care to translate that "should" into a well-specified forecast with attached probability? :)
We are assuming that the change will affect comments at -4 or lower, but it might not change the number of large discussions under comments at -3. There might be discussions that transition between censored and uncensored. The censorship might actually prevent comments at -4 from being downvoted even worse, and thus could perversely make transitions back to -3 more likely.
It would be interesting to run some stats on how frequent the event of interest is (assuming we can specify it coherently), before and after the change. Based on my memory of the LW codebase, votes are stored transactionally, so it should be possible to compute before/after statistics at any time.
Care to translate that "should" into a well-specified forecast with attached probability? :)
Very approximately, I'd say I expect at least 50% less comments posted in downvoted threads, with probability 70%.
(though I don't think that adding precise numbers adds much to the discussion)
I just found out that a new website feature was implemented 2 days ago. If a comment is voted to -4 or below, it and all replies and downstream comments from it will be hidden from Recent Comments, and further replies in that subthread will incur 5 karma points penalty. The hiding, but not karma penalty, applies retroactively to comments in that subthread posted before the -4 vote.
This seems to be worth a discussion post since most people are probably still voting things to below -3 without knowing the new consequences of doing so.