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.)
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The comment was retracted before receiving any votes, with the purpose of being visible but not subject to karma (visible here).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.
You think you’re confused? Apparently when my comment was deleted by a moderator, it is NOT deleted in my own view of the thread! So I am reading these confused followup comments with people talking about my having deleted my comment, and I’m staring at the page SEEING my comment there! It was only in a different view where I saw my alread-deleted comment did not have a “delete” option on it while a newer retracted comment I had made did show a delete option that I guessed that my comment had been deleted, but with no indication on my screen that it was not publicly visible.
The fact that non-moderators don’t know it when a moderator has deleted their comments is very confusing. Once an entire subthread I was in was deleted by someone, but we only figured out what was going on because the other person was a mod herself.
I consider the main point of retraction to be a reconsideration of the value of a comment—that is, it should be used to say “This is, on further consideration, wrong, or without value” while leaving the reasoning for why it was wrong (or without value) in the first place intact, so other people don’t commit the same mistake. This is so regardless of whether the karma value of the comment is positive or negative.
Karma values are, in general, a useful gauge, but not an ultimate gauge, of the usefulness of a comment; they are in the end the consensus view of a post or comment, which may or may not be “correct”.
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.
This is a misuse of the retraction feature. Don’t do this.
Even though my retracted comment can’t be downvoted, I’ve received 3 downvotes on other comments because of this.
In any case, if you don’t want people to work to the metric, why put the metric in place?
And for those students of psychology: was I downvoted because I misused the feature, or was I downvoted because I stated what I was doing? I have certainly prophylactically retracted comments before without being downvoted, but in those instances I didn’t say why I was retracting.
I’ll retract this comment too. If you want to downvote me for this it will cost you extra keystrokes. Is it really a good use of your lesswrong.com time?
I disagree—retracting a comment just means “I regret saying this”, whatever the reasons for that.
OTOH, I think that as a matter of honesty one should still keep the original text of the retracted comment intact (possibly with an explanation for the retraction added), unless it is contains potential memetic hazards (even for readers who know the writer has disavowed it), discloses confidential information, or similar.
EDIT: Should have looked into this more carefully—apparently he retracted the comment immediately after posting it. Yes, I agree that’s improper. Retracting.
His action can be circumvented though—just downvote two of his other comments. Obviously I do not enforce this strategy under circumstances other than to punish this exploit, but defectors should be punished.
Karma is not just about reward/punishment, it’s also about information. The karma score of a comment tells me how many people found it worth reading, and how many people found it harmful—and comments can be sorted for that. Downvoting comments one wouldn’t otherwise have just because of who they were written by amounts to injecting noise into that information. Please don’t do that.
What’s abusive about it? You’d rather he lose more karma from a mistake that he’s already learned from?
In general, I’m in favor of people acknowledging past mistakes, rather than pretending that nothing their past selves did was in error. Even when the acknowledgment is of the form “oops, I suppose it was a mistake to voice this opinion in this forum” rather than “my opinion was wrong”.
I’d really prefer we didn’t have a social norm that changing your mind in response to other people’s input is a bad thing, even when sometimes people learn a different lesson than the one we wanted them to. Besides, is it really so much worse for someone to learn the lesson “this sort of thing results in karma loss” vs “that comment didn’t contribute to the site and wasn’t worth posting”? Are they really such different lessons?
I have not deleted any comments. Indeed, all my comments show up in my view of the thread as this comment is posted. Maybe they were deleted by a moderator and then put back?
What’s abusive about it? You’d rather he lose more karma from a mistake that he’s already learned from?
It appears that the original comment was made with the intent of immediately retracting it. “Learning from a mistake” is not a reasonable description of that behavior. But Larks’ solution is not a good idea because two wrongs don’t make a right (in this circumstance).
That said, I agree with you that retraction of a comment that one is surprised is heavily down-voted or otherwise learns later is wrong is a very reasonable reaction.
Maybe I just overvalue karma. But I like the local norm that posts stand or fall on their own merits, not bad things the author has done elsewhere. The original criticism by Vladimir_Nesov was sufficient punishment, and even if it wasn’t, the next obvious intervention (the one you described) just seems excessive to me. Likewise, I think the downvotes you received for raising the question is more negative stimuli than necessary, given evand’s comment.
This is a misuse of the retraction feature. Don’t do this.
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.)
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.
Thanks for clearing up the terminology.
I think, if the parent had included something like “and therefore I am deleting your post,” I probably would not have been confused.
You think you’re confused? Apparently when my comment was deleted by a moderator, it is NOT deleted in my own view of the thread! So I am reading these confused followup comments with people talking about my having deleted my comment, and I’m staring at the page SEEING my comment there! It was only in a different view where I saw my alread-deleted comment did not have a “delete” option on it while a newer retracted comment I had made did show a delete option that I guessed that my comment had been deleted, but with no indication on my screen that it was not publicly visible.
The fact that non-moderators don’t know it when a moderator has deleted their comments is very confusing. Once an entire subthread I was in was deleted by someone, but we only figured out what was going on because the other person was a mod herself.
I consider the main point of retraction to be a reconsideration of the value of a comment—that is, it should be used to say “This is, on further consideration, wrong, or without value” while leaving the reasoning for why it was wrong (or without value) in the first place intact, so other people don’t commit the same mistake. This is so regardless of whether the karma value of the comment is positive or negative.
Karma values are, in general, a useful gauge, but not an ultimate gauge, of the usefulness of a comment; they are in the end the consensus view of a post or comment, which may or may not be “correct”.
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.
Even though my retracted comment can’t be downvoted, I’ve received 3 downvotes on other comments because of this.
In any case, if you don’t want people to work to the metric, why put the metric in place?
And for those students of psychology: was I downvoted because I misused the feature, or was I downvoted because I stated what I was doing? I have certainly prophylactically retracted comments before without being downvoted, but in those instances I didn’t say why I was retracting.
I’ll retract this comment too. If you want to downvote me for this it will cost you extra keystrokes. Is it really a good use of your lesswrong.com time?
I disagree—retracting a comment just means “I regret saying this”, whatever the reasons for that.
OTOH, I think that as a matter of honesty one should still keep the original text of the retracted comment intact (possibly with an explanation for the retraction added), unless it is contains potential memetic hazards (even for readers who know the writer has disavowed it), discloses confidential information, or similar.
EDIT: Should have looked into this more carefully—apparently he retracted the comment immediately after posting it. Yes, I agree that’s improper. Retracting.
I agree that this is abuse.
His action can be circumvented though—just downvote two of his other comments. Obviously I do not enforce this strategy under circumstances other than to punish this exploit, but defectors should be punished.
No.
Karma is not just about reward/punishment, it’s also about information. The karma score of a comment tells me how many people found it worth reading, and how many people found it harmful—and comments can be sorted for that. Downvoting comments one wouldn’t otherwise have just because of who they were written by amounts to injecting noise into that information. Please don’t do that.
What’s abusive about it? You’d rather he lose more karma from a mistake that he’s already learned from?
In general, I’m in favor of people acknowledging past mistakes, rather than pretending that nothing their past selves did was in error. Even when the acknowledgment is of the form “oops, I suppose it was a mistake to voice this opinion in this forum” rather than “my opinion was wrong”.
I’d really prefer we didn’t have a social norm that changing your mind in response to other people’s input is a bad thing, even when sometimes people learn a different lesson than the one we wanted them to. Besides, is it really so much worse for someone to learn the lesson “this sort of thing results in karma loss” vs “that comment didn’t contribute to the site and wasn’t worth posting”? Are they really such different lessons?
He posted and immediately retracted. The retraction wasn’t because he’d learned from his mistake, it was to protect himself from punishment.
Now that he’s deleted his comment mine looks asine, as it lacks context. However, I will not retract mine.
I have not deleted any comments. Indeed, all my comments show up in my view of the thread as this comment is posted. Maybe they were deleted by a moderator and then put back?
Maybe they are a basilisk?
My apologies—I retract the criticism of your deletion.
It appears that the original comment was made with the intent of immediately retracting it. “Learning from a mistake” is not a reasonable description of that behavior. But Larks’ solution is not a good idea because two wrongs don’t make a right (in this circumstance).
That said, I agree with you that retraction of a comment that one is surprised is heavily down-voted or otherwise learns later is wrong is a very reasonable reaction.
What else do you suggest we do when people defect in n-player prisoners’ dilemmas? (Or do you doubt the relevance of the comparison?)
Maybe I just overvalue karma. But I like the local norm that posts stand or fall on their own merits, not bad things the author has done elsewhere. The original criticism by Vladimir_Nesov was sufficient punishment, and even if it wasn’t, the next obvious intervention (the one you described) just seems excessive to me. Likewise, I think the downvotes you received for raising the question is more negative stimuli than necessary, given evand’s comment.