2 seems also problematic because there are conversation threads that start with highly downvoted comments but themselves contain useful remarks.
Agreed; the automatic warnings (as in (3)) should be enough to remind people that they might be posting in a stupid thread. (Maybe direct replies to a comment below −4 shouldn’t appear in the Recent Comments feed, and perhaps direct replies to anything else posted by the same user within the same thread?)
I support (1), though. It doesn’t seem unreasonable (let alone tyrannical) to allow moderators to delete comments and have them be actually deleted, or actually not-publicly-viewable at least; pretty much all forum software allows that.
The flipside is that the automatic warnings reduces the problems with 2. Once the warning occurs, the discussion can simply be moved to, well, the discussion area. (I’m not begging for new LW functionality, I just mean that when someone sees that waring, they can instead just start something in the discussion area and maybe leave a link in the thread to the new discussion)
Maybe direct replies to a comment below −4 shouldn’t appear in the Recent Comments feed, and perhaps direct replies to anything else posted by the same user within the same thread?
I like the first half of that, but not the second. It is possible to say something stupid and something worthwhile in the same thread, and it would be unneccessarily confusing to have replies to non-downvoted comments not showing up.
Agreed; the automatic warnings (as in (3)) should be enough to remind people that they might be posting in a stupid thread. (Maybe direct replies to a comment below −4 shouldn’t appear in the Recent Comments feed, and perhaps direct replies to anything else posted by the same user within the same thread?)
I support (1), though. It doesn’t seem unreasonable (let alone tyrannical) to allow moderators to delete comments and have them be actually deleted, or actually not-publicly-viewable at least; pretty much all forum software allows that.
The flipside is that the automatic warnings reduces the problems with 2. Once the warning occurs, the discussion can simply be moved to, well, the discussion area. (I’m not begging for new LW functionality, I just mean that when someone sees that waring, they can instead just start something in the discussion area and maybe leave a link in the thread to the new discussion)
I like the first half of that, but not the second. It is possible to say something stupid and something worthwhile in the same thread, and it would be unneccessarily confusing to have replies to non-downvoted comments not showing up.