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SquirrelInHell asked:
I can imagine a few possible reasons against that; Chesterton fence included. Essentially, the rest of LW act as a filter for some kind of personality. Having rules like "don't downvote anything stupid as long as it is nice and cheerful" could undermine the whole purpose of the website.
What I wanted is probably to have people filtered by X, and then see them doing Y. Because I believe that Y can be more awesome when done with people already filtered by X. Kind of.
Even more generally, when I try using real life as an example, during the day one's mood changes. You have serious moments, and you have silly moments. It would be wrong to remain stuck in one mode forever. On a website, having one fixed set of rules and one culture kinda pushes people to stay in one kind of mood all the time. Which is somewhat unhealthy.
But we would need some way to synchronize the mood changes. In real life this is achieved by the place where you meet, by the current agenda, by nonverbal signals, etc. But on web, we don't even write at the same time. So the only way to synchronize is per thread, I guess. So this is a thread for breaking the general mood.
This is not at all what I mean. I'm suggesting adding a new requirement (be nice) to the existing ones, without relaxing existing standards. Current LW standards are focused on the content, not the presentation - and by adding this fairly simple requirement in the presentation layer I don't think we are changing the range of possible content you can express.
Other points, agreed.