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ModusPonies comments on Overcoming bias guy meme | quickmeme - Less Wrong Discussion
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EDIT: The below is based on my misunderstanding of terminology. It turns out "retract" and "delete" are different things. Oops.
Huh. To me, that sounds like exactly sort of behavior a karma system is supposed to encourage. Post worthless comment => comment downvoted => retract comment => future readers don't waste time reading it.
I retract [EDIT: delete] comments in high-traffic subthreads threads if they don't get upvoted after a day or two. Should I stop doing this?
(Disclaimer: I did not see the original before it was deleted.)
retract = strikethrough + disable voting
delete = make invisible (a second step after retraction)
The comment was retracted before receiving any votes, with the purpose of being visible but not subject to karma (visible here). I am surprised that this was not clear from the quote; perhaps it's a matter of giving the benefit of the doubt to the user vs the moderator? It was deleted by a moderator, not the user. I think this deletion is very clearly the right action, to the point that I'm surprised that VN didn't delete it when he left his reply.
If you want to avoid clutter, you should delete, not just retract, but it looks to me that you do. If you change your mind, you should say that, not (just) retract, and probably not delete. The main point of retraction is to let someone pull out of the karma system without disrupting a conversation. In principle, an edit saying that should discourage downvotes, but in practice it doesn't. Also, for good or for ill, it discourages reading the comment a bit more than an edit.
Thanks for clearing up the terminology.
I think, if the parent had included something like "and therefore I am deleting your post," I probably would not have been confused.
You think you're confused? Apparently when my comment was deleted by a moderator, it is NOT deleted in my own view of the thread! So I am reading these confused followup comments with people talking about my having deleted my comment, and I'm staring at the page SEEING my comment there! It was only in a different view where I saw my alread-deleted comment did not have a "delete" option on it while a newer retracted comment I had made did show a delete option that I guessed that my comment had been deleted, but with no indication on my screen that it was not publicly visible.
The fact that non-moderators don't know it when a moderator has deleted their comments is very confusing. Once an entire subthread I was in was deleted by someone, but we only figured out what was going on because the other person was a mod herself.
I consider the main point of retraction to be a reconsideration of the value of a comment - that is, it should be used to say "This is, on further consideration, wrong, or without value" while leaving the reasoning for why it was wrong (or without value) in the first place intact, so other people don't commit the same mistake. This is so regardless of whether the karma value of the comment is positive or negative.
Karma values are, in general, a useful gauge, but not an ultimate gauge, of the usefulness of a comment; they are in the end the consensus view of a post or comment, which may or may not be "correct".
You don't need to do that. The voting system already allows good comments to rise to the top, and because it gives a bonus for recent ones you don't need to worry about your old unvotedup comments hiding new promising ones.