There are two ways I remember previous admin behavior not following what I have in mind:
Shutting down commenting to a particular comment without explanation and then moving to shut down a discussion about that by shutting down comments again.
Claiming that karma voting isn’t made with “the whole website in mind” and nobody knows why people vote the way they did. I think it’s part of LW’s culture to often have people say “I downvoted because of X” in a comment and then that comment can be discussed.
It’s also possible to ask “Why was this downvoted?”. This usually results in either someone writing an explanation or readers thinking “I don’t see any reason why this should be low karma, I’ll upvote it.” Those discussions are productive ways to form a shared understanding about what we downvote and I consider them an important addition to threads on meta/
There are two ways I remember previous admin behavior not following what I have in mind:
Shutting down commenting to a particular comment without explanation and then moving to shut down a discussion about that by shutting down comments again.
Claiming that karma voting isn’t made with “the whole website in mind” and nobody knows why people vote the way they did. I think it’s part of LW’s culture to often have people say “I downvoted because of X” in a comment and then that comment can be discussed.
It’s also possible to ask “Why was this downvoted?”. This usually results in either someone writing an explanation or readers thinking “I don’t see any reason why this should be low karma, I’ll upvote it.” Those discussions are productive ways to form a shared understanding about what we downvote and I consider them an important addition to threads on meta/