My observations are consistent with your impression and don’t think we should try to do anything about it.
I also suspect that an analysis of tone—roughly speaking, to how obnoxiously the commenter comes across—would account for a large chunk of the variance.
I was just trying to think of what obnoxious means in this context because, well, who of us wants to come across as obnoxious? And I think it means, with some latitude, that the writer suggests that he or she is aiming at something different than what the other participants are aiming at. This could be egotism/narcissism, persuading others towards a pet belief system, or taunting others/trollishness.
The other alternative could be issues concerning rhetorical style. Either the rhetoric of the writer is uncomfortable to what the reader is accustomed to, or the emphasis of the posts makes it difficult for readers to pierce the arguments for substance.
If I were to do this analysis, there are a few dimensions I would look at first to see how much variance they account for:
ratio of words devoted to negation, vs. words devoted to proposing an alternative idea or to asking for clarification
nonresponsiveness… that is, where comment C1 = X, and C2 = “-X, because Y1..Y3”, and C3 = X with no significant addressing of Y1..Y3. (This is a little tricky, though because in general I expect the absolute value of karma scores to decrease the more nested they are.)
the combination of stridency and incoherence. (Either in isolation I wouldn’t expect to account for much negative karma.)
My observations are consistent with your impression and don’t think we should try to do anything about it.
I also suspect that an analysis of tone—roughly speaking, to how obnoxiously the commenter comes across—would account for a large chunk of the variance.
I was just trying to think of what obnoxious means in this context because, well, who of us wants to come across as obnoxious? And I think it means, with some latitude, that the writer suggests that he or she is aiming at something different than what the other participants are aiming at. This could be egotism/narcissism, persuading others towards a pet belief system, or taunting others/trollishness.
The other alternative could be issues concerning rhetorical style. Either the rhetoric of the writer is uncomfortable to what the reader is accustomed to, or the emphasis of the posts makes it difficult for readers to pierce the arguments for substance.
Or other meanings I’m not aware of.
If I were to do this analysis, there are a few dimensions I would look at first to see how much variance they account for:
ratio of words devoted to negation, vs. words devoted to proposing an alternative idea or to asking for clarification
nonresponsiveness… that is, where comment C1 = X, and C2 = “-X, because Y1..Y3”, and C3 = X with no significant addressing of Y1..Y3. (This is a little tricky, though because in general I expect the absolute value of karma scores to decrease the more nested they are.)
the combination of stridency and incoherence. (Either in isolation I wouldn’t expect to account for much negative karma.)
Ahah, that certain aids in understanding your statement.