I have no particular antipathy toward either Wei Dai or wedrifid, nor did I allow myself to develop a particular attachment to either “side” in that particular controversy, given that the appearance of “sides” at all didn’t strike me as particularly productive.
Not productive in the slightest. In fact I would happily downvote my own comment (despite reflectively endorsing it) just to hide the entire pointless load of tripe.
Yep, there’s some of my own comments I wish I could downvote for the same reason.
Really? This is a little surprising but only in a purely logistical sense. You don’t tend to be in situations where that can be effective. Voting on your comments is more extreme than with most so whenever your comments form part of an unproductive conversation they already tend to be downvoted way below the threshold where less prominent users who draw less attention may only have reached −2 or −3. For this reason I suspect the current implementation handles this for you with requiring your noble self-sacrifice.
(Pardon me if I’m just being too literal and you meant “would wish to be able to downvote”. The prominence and popularization factor is just what popped into my head following the “that would be redundant” thought.)
This is likely the point of the rule: to discourage otherwise-high-quality comments that might inspire a wave of crappy ones.
Yes, and I like it (a lot). Especially now that the comments are hidden. When the comments were still visible it was more necessary to reply (so that errors aren’t accepted without correction). Now the (presumably, more often than not) bad replies don’t require high-quality refutation because they are invisible to those who don’t seek them out. The penalty to comment replies has very little downside.
Not productive in the slightest. In fact I would happily downvote my own comment (despite reflectively endorsing it) just to hide the entire pointless load of tripe.
Yep, there’s some of my own comments I wish I could downvote for the same reason.
Really? This is a little surprising but only in a purely logistical sense. You don’t tend to be in situations where that can be effective. Voting on your comments is more extreme than with most so whenever your comments form part of an unproductive conversation they already tend to be downvoted way below the threshold where less prominent users who draw less attention may only have reached −2 or −3. For this reason I suspect the current implementation handles this for you with requiring your noble self-sacrifice.
(Pardon me if I’m just being too literal and you meant “would wish to be able to downvote”. The prominence and popularization factor is just what popped into my head following the “that would be redundant” thought.)
Me too. And that was even a feature of the system, once upon a time. But I’m not bitter, no.
This is likely the point of the rule: to discourage otherwise-high-quality comments that might inspire a wave of crappy ones.
The problem seemed to be that a crappy comment can sometimes inspire a wave of good comments.
Yes, and I like it (a lot). Especially now that the comments are hidden. When the comments were still visible it was more necessary to reply (so that errors aren’t accepted without correction). Now the (presumably, more often than not) bad replies don’t require high-quality refutation because they are invisible to those who don’t seek them out. The penalty to comment replies has very little downside.