I have no intrinsic problem with the tool of rate limits. It’s more a question of when it’s the best tool for the job and which jobs to prioritize.
Karma already does a lot of the job of deprioritizing uninteresting or poorly thought out comments. Its failure mode is that it’s a status modifier and can lead to hurt feelings, since somebody had to make the decision to click the downvote button on you. Likewise, a poor comment that is worded in a hurtful way can still lead to hurt feelings, no matter its visibility. I’d love to be able to turn off karma score visibility entirely, and just keep the visibility ranking they generate. I don’t like greaterwrong’s design but I do like how it hides karma scores.
A second issue is that you can moderate disruptive active users, but it’s hard to recover a user who quits in frustration. Older users have more connection to the site and more awareness of its norms and how to make it work for them. So I would prioritize using new tools to make the site more welcoming for newcomers, and educating old timers on the tools that exist to make the site work better. I’ve been on the site for years and didn’t know you could block specific users until a few days ago. Making all these options very visible and easy to use, all in one place, and expanding their number seems great. Periodic reminders would be a good idea.
Here’s a weird idea. I should be able to tag specific users with standardized “reputation badges” that nobody else can see directly—could be just a user specific upvote or downvote that only affects their visibility to me. Could also be something like “often rude, sometimes insightful.” I’m even more interested in a sort of LW opt-in whisper network: I could take user X with a “hurts my feelings often” standard tag, and then could see how many other users have tagged them that way, or something like that. Even minus the social element, giving me a way to make an assessment of a specific user that will pop up alongside their comments (but only visible to me) would be somehow helpful. Hard to explain why exactly.
List of thoughts:
I have no intrinsic problem with the tool of rate limits. It’s more a question of when it’s the best tool for the job and which jobs to prioritize.
Karma already does a lot of the job of deprioritizing uninteresting or poorly thought out comments. Its failure mode is that it’s a status modifier and can lead to hurt feelings, since somebody had to make the decision to click the downvote button on you. Likewise, a poor comment that is worded in a hurtful way can still lead to hurt feelings, no matter its visibility. I’d love to be able to turn off karma score visibility entirely, and just keep the visibility ranking they generate. I don’t like greaterwrong’s design but I do like how it hides karma scores.
A second issue is that you can moderate disruptive active users, but it’s hard to recover a user who quits in frustration. Older users have more connection to the site and more awareness of its norms and how to make it work for them. So I would prioritize using new tools to make the site more welcoming for newcomers, and educating old timers on the tools that exist to make the site work better. I’ve been on the site for years and didn’t know you could block specific users until a few days ago. Making all these options very visible and easy to use, all in one place, and expanding their number seems great. Periodic reminders would be a good idea.
Here’s a weird idea. I should be able to tag specific users with standardized “reputation badges” that nobody else can see directly—could be just a user specific upvote or downvote that only affects their visibility to me. Could also be something like “often rude, sometimes insightful.” I’m even more interested in a sort of LW opt-in whisper network: I could take user X with a “hurts my feelings often” standard tag, and then could see how many other users have tagged them that way, or something like that. Even minus the social element, giving me a way to make an assessment of a specific user that will pop up alongside their comments (but only visible to me) would be somehow helpful. Hard to explain why exactly.