OK, so to be clear: you’re predicting a roughly 50% decrease of the population “comments which are descendants of comments downvoted −4 or more”. This at “I’d be pretty surprised if it turned out otherwise”, which is my verbal equivalent of 70%. (For 80% it’s “I would be shocked” and for 90% it’s “I’d seriously question my worldview on the topic in question”, for 99% it’s “you should really not be messing around with anything remotely connected with that topic, you’re dangerous to yourself and others”.)
Here are some of the uncertainties.
We don’t know how large this population is currently. There is a subjective feeling that this number is significant and annoyingly so, but if it is small then it may be hard to detect an effect among the noise.
We don’t know many new comments arise from replies to Recent Comments, as opposed to two people going back and forth, or people explicitly looking for new stuff in a discussion they’re following, or people following a particular commenter.
We don’t know how fast low-quality comments get to −4 before they have accrued substantial discussion, or alternately the ratio between number of comments accumulated before getting to −4 and comments accumulated after.
Sadly, I’m about 65% sure that we’ll never get to have actual stats on the above, or on the prediction itself. :-/
OK, so to be clear: you’re predicting a roughly 50% decrease of the population “comments which are descendants of comments downvoted −4 or more”. This at “I’d be pretty surprised if it turned out otherwise”, which is my verbal equivalent of 70%. (For 80% it’s “I would be shocked” and for 90% it’s “I’d seriously question my worldview on the topic in question”, for 99% it’s “you should really not be messing around with anything remotely connected with that topic, you’re dangerous to yourself and others”.)
Here are some of the uncertainties.
We don’t know how large this population is currently. There is a subjective feeling that this number is significant and annoyingly so, but if it is small then it may be hard to detect an effect among the noise.
We don’t know many new comments arise from replies to Recent Comments, as opposed to two people going back and forth, or people explicitly looking for new stuff in a discussion they’re following, or people following a particular commenter.
We don’t know how fast low-quality comments get to −4 before they have accrued substantial discussion, or alternately the ratio between number of comments accumulated before getting to −4 and comments accumulated after.
Sadly, I’m about 65% sure that we’ll never get to have actual stats on the above, or on the prediction itself. :-/