LessWrong v2.0 Anti-Kibitzer (hides comment authors and vote counts)
About 10 years ago, I wrote the original LessWrong 1.0 anti-kibitzer. The original rationale for creating it was as a de-biasing tool to aid in judging ideas by their contents, rather than their author or popularity. The original post goes into the rationale for its creation in more depth so I won’t repeat myself here.
As such, I went back and updated it for the modern site. Follow the link to find the UserScript, some screenshots of it in action, and installation instructions. I have also added an additional feature which replaces the usernames with colorful bars of different lengths and colors. This makes threaded conversations easier to follow, as it enables one to tell when two comments are written by the same individual.
Let me know in the comments if you find any bugs or have any feature requests.
Note that greaterwrong.com already has this. (The eye icon on the bottom right.)
Feature request: Q&A posts show a sidebar with all top-level answers and the associated usernames (example). Would be nice if the Anti-Kibitzer could hide these usernames.
The script works well on individual posts, but I find that on the lesswrong.com homepage, it displays names and vote counts for about 3 seconds before it finishes executing. Perhaps there’s some way to make it run faster, or failing that, to block the page from rendering until the script finishes running?
Somewhat debatable whether this is a desirable feature, but right now the ordering of comments leaks information about their vote counts. Perhaps it would be good to randomize comment order.
Note that you can set the comment ordering (I’m not sure offhand whether it’s persistent but I think it is)
Oh, the answer here is to set your default sort order in your user-settings: https://www.lesswrong.com/account