I have an idea for eliminating status on LW, if that’s what people want. My own status is ‘glad I’m allowed in here at all’, so it wouldn’t make a difference for me personally. ;-) What if your posts didn’t show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I’m sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
What if your posts didn’t show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I’m sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
Your suggestion would indeed eliminate most status and reputation influences from the site. And this would be a bad thing.
I prefer to know who I am reading, even if, as in the case of many usernames here, the knowledge is no more than “this is the same person who wrote these other things”. It gives context to the words: what they mean can depend very much on who is saying them. And one can hardly have a coherent conversation if there is no way to join up separate comments into a single identity.
It’s not a bad idea if that werewhatttt people wanted, but there are people I definitely want to ignore on here, and people who I think worth spending more time on than others.
Geh, got to update in favour of some behaviors being more common than I thought now.
I’m not sure that removing usernames is necessarily a good idea; they have a valid and important benefit.
Let us assume that a person says X. I suspect that X is most likely incorrect. I then look at that person’s username. If:
a) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who I have found is right far more often than wrong; then I take a closer look at X, and ask the person to explain, and generally put some effort into investigating X. It is likely that X is not as wrong as I thought, and I would learn something.
b) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who often posts things that are incorrect. I don’t bother to waste time trying to research X, since I am now even more confident that X is wrong.
c) The username is not one that I recognise, or it is one that I recognise but have not formed an opinion on yet. I may spend a small amount of effort thinking about X; but I am likely to nudge the username a little closer to category b.
In this way, I can optimise the amount of effort I put into trying to see which statements are correct, by putting the most effort into statements from which I am most likely to learn something new.
I have an idea for eliminating status on LW, if that’s what people want. My own status is ‘glad I’m allowed in here at all’, so it wouldn’t make a difference for me personally. ;-)
What if your posts didn’t show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I’m sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
Well, there is the LW anti-kibitzer, which can be enabled via the Preferences page.
Your suggestion would indeed eliminate most status and reputation influences from the site. And this would be a bad thing.
I prefer to know who I am reading, even if, as in the case of many usernames here, the knowledge is no more than “this is the same person who wrote these other things”. It gives context to the words: what they mean can depend very much on who is saying them. And one can hardly have a coherent conversation if there is no way to join up separate comments into a single identity.
It’s not a bad idea if that werewhatttt people wanted, but there are people I definitely want to ignore on here, and people who I think worth spending more time on than others.
Geh, got to update in favour of some behaviors being more common than I thought now.
I’m not sure that removing usernames is necessarily a good idea; they have a valid and important benefit.
Let us assume that a person says X. I suspect that X is most likely incorrect. I then look at that person’s username. If:
a) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who I have found is right far more often than wrong; then I take a closer look at X, and ask the person to explain, and generally put some effort into investigating X. It is likely that X is not as wrong as I thought, and I would learn something. b) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who often posts things that are incorrect. I don’t bother to waste time trying to research X, since I am now even more confident that X is wrong. c) The username is not one that I recognise, or it is one that I recognise but have not formed an opinion on yet. I may spend a small amount of effort thinking about X; but I am likely to nudge the username a little closer to category b.
In this way, I can optimise the amount of effort I put into trying to see which statements are correct, by putting the most effort into statements from which I am most likely to learn something new.
Sometimes you need to do things like ban a troll...