Overcoming bias guy meme | quickmeme

saliency

http://www.quickmeme.com/Overcoming-bias-guy/popular/1/?upcoming

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.)

I delete comments in high-traffic threads if they don't get upvoted after a day or two.

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.

6Douglas_Knight13y

retract = strikethrough + disable voting delete = make invisible (a second step after retraction) The comment was retracted before receiving any votes, with the purpose of being visible but not subject to karma (visible here).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.