This confuses me. I can understand how one could think the −5 penalty is useful and I can understand having further comments not show up in recent changes. But if the primary problem seems to be signal/noise in Recent Comments then the penalty doesn’t do anything useful. Worse, if a useful thread occurs in part of a downvoted thread, not only will one need to move it over somewhere else, if one wants any chance that people reading that part of the subthread will be able to follow to the new location, one will need to post a comment in that subthread pointing people to it. That will mean one will still need to pay the −5 penalty. This is a not well-thought out combination.
Maybe we need a “move to open discussion thread” voting button in addition to the karma buttons. Above a certain threshold off-topic but useful discussions could thereby be moved and orphaned from an original <-4 parent, perhaps leaving a link to the new thread or more sensibly someone else could just link to the new thread in another comment if there’s any lingering topicalness. This would further discourage trolls because there would no longer be any correlation between their downvoted comment and a good discussion.
This confuses me. I can understand how one could think the −5 penalty is useful and I can understand having further comments not show up in recent changes. But if the primary problem seems to be signal/noise in Recent Comments then the penalty doesn’t do anything useful. Worse, if a useful thread occurs in part of a downvoted thread, not only will one need to move it over somewhere else, if one wants any chance that people reading that part of the subthread will be able to follow to the new location, one will need to post a comment in that subthread pointing people to it. That will mean one will still need to pay the −5 penalty. This is a not well-thought out combination.
Maybe we need a “move to open discussion thread” voting button in addition to the karma buttons. Above a certain threshold off-topic but useful discussions could thereby be moved and orphaned from an original <-4 parent, perhaps leaving a link to the new thread or more sensibly someone else could just link to the new thread in another comment if there’s any lingering topicalness. This would further discourage trolls because there would no longer be any correlation between their downvoted comment and a good discussion.