And I now see that contrary to the feature request, it’s only asking for 5 karma for immediate descendants, not anywhere in the chain, so I shall go now and ask that to be updated.
A lot of discussion happens without much use of the context in which it started. If a good conversation starts under (perhaps 4 levels lower than) a comment that will in the future sink to −3 or lower, that stops the conversation, without any convenient way of extracting it outside that thread. I don’t believe the conversation should be discouraged in such cases. (Do you think it should? I expect it would be very inconvenient and annoying without the additional subthread-extraction feature.)
On the other hand, typical clueless-feeding conversations are mostly back-and-forth between a user in a failure mode and those who reply to them directly. The clueless normally gets downvoted, but those who reply to them are not, and the measure of Karma-punishing those who directly reply to downvoted comments would address that.
I don’t want people to learn the habit of unhiding comments! Comments that will end up being hidden by default mostly shouldn’t exist. If there’s something amazingly intelligent to say, put it in a top-level comment to begin with, not somewhere it will be hidden by default!
I would simply like to point out the irony of having this discussion in a thread that is hidden by default due to being below a comment currently at −9.
And: Did anyone take a karma hit for this to happen? Or does it turn out that we’re just incentivizing being quick on the trigger—so whoever’s camping out on the site and can get to a comment before its score plummets gets to talk about it and no one else can without accepting the ding?
I paid 5 karma for making this comment. But if everyone in the subthread had to pay 5 karma, or if people below 1000 karma couldn’t participate at all, then this thread would be much smaller. Comments of minor significance, like this one and others, would probably not exist. This ceteris paribus I would see as a loss.
Meta-discussion is also a horrible slime-dripping cancer on a forum
Meta-discussion has to occur on fora if fora are going to function. It may be that non-functioning fora have more meta-discussion, but there are obvious correlation v. causation issues.
Meta-discussion has to occur on fora if fora are going to function.
You have some evidence for this?
In this thread and the perfectly superfluous other thread you made for this topic, I have observed a tendency to state ex cathedra beliefs on the nature of communities and what mechanisms are necessary for their survival.
Only some personal experience and general intuition. I don’t think anyone, even Eliezer, is going to argue that zero meta discussion is optimal. The question then is how much is optimal. It is possible that a weaker version of my statement like starting it with “it seems that” might have been helpful.
In this thread and the perfectly superfluous other thread you made for this topic, I have observed a tendency to state ex cathedra beliefs on the nature of communities and what mechanisms are necessary for their survival.
I agree that there’s a fair bit of stated beliefs without much evidence all around, although I’m puzzled by your description of the other thread as superfluous.
I agreed with this as a general principle strongly enough to pay a 5 karma penalty to say so. I don’t think it should be as down voted as it is.
I can’t recall having ever participated in a forum or blog and have the pay offs of meta-discussion be higher than discussing something else. More problematically it is way too engaging than it should be and is an attention sink.
Er, I unhid all comments because I was curious. I know I’ve made my share of hidden comments over my time here. I was so glad when I learned there was the option to get rid of hiding by default.
I for one don’t want a mess of top level comments responding to posts that have been hidden, with no organization. There’s a reason this sort of thing is divided into threads.
Comments that will end up being hidden by default mostly shouldn’t exist.
Then why don’t the grand-high muckity-mucks just censor the posts honestly? I do not see how that could possibly be less effective than this crowd-sourced star chamber scheme, which manages to be simultaneously opaque, unaccountable, and open to abuse by the trolls it’s supposed to be suppressing.
I agree with this subgoal, but the inconvenience and annoyance of having your whole (good) discussion starting to get punished after it is well underway because of the properties of some grand-grand...-parent comment on an unrelated topic seems like a strong argument against. I think this shouldn’t be done until a way of mitigating this problem is found.
I’d love to have a way to move comments. If anyone’s willing to donate enough money, this site could hire a full-time programmer and have all kinds of amazing new features. Meanwhile the development resources just don’t exist.
Threads with downvoted ancestors were already being punished. They got hidden by default with no warning to commenters that this is the case. Unless people have already learned to unhide by reflex—and then the site has no visual filter mechanism!
That it’s difficult to do this right is not an argument for doing it poorly. My point is that it’ll have a negative effect on net if implemented without thread-moving, with the correct goal of discouraging bad conversations getting obscured by the problem I’ve pointed out. Only if the problem is mitigated (by thread-moving or something else) will it be a good idea to implement what you suggest. If it can’t be mitigated with available resources, then nothing more should be done for now.
I’d love to have a way to move comments. If anyone’s willing to donate enough money, this site could hire a full-time programmer and have all kinds of amazing new features. Meanwhile the development resources just don’t exist.
How much would part-time or one-off single feature development work cost? If you are going to tell the public that a problem is easily solved with money, you should aim to give the public a sense of the problem’s scope.
A web developer volunteered to help improve the site. Sorry that the link to the volunteer offer goes to a slime-dripping cancer meta thread, but that is where it happens to be. The link. drinks a chaser for my −5 karma points
I reply to you post because the system doesn’t allow me to reply directly to Yudkowsky since I don’t have enough karma (karma can become negative due to downvotes but not by paying the penality, apparently).
You might want to consider splitting LW off SI and operating it a a separate charity, because there might be people who would wish to donate to LW but not to SI.
I’m proceeding to answer anyway. I have karma to burn.
Does the karma subtraction happen if for answers to comments which are −3 or below when the comment is posted, or does that −5 cost come and go depending on the karma of the comment being answered? Or is the loss permanent regardless of what the karma of the comment being answered becomes?
A lot of discussion happens without much use of the context in which it started. If a good conversation starts under (perhaps 4 levels lower than) a comment that will in the future sink to −3 or lower, that stops the conversation, without any convenient way of extracting it outside that thread. I don’t believe the conversation should be discouraged in such cases. (Do you think it should? I expect it would be very inconvenient and annoying without the additional subthread-extraction feature.)
On the other hand, typical clueless-feeding conversations are mostly back-and-forth between a user in a failure mode and those who reply to them directly. The clueless normally gets downvoted, but those who reply to them are not, and the measure of Karma-punishing those who directly reply to downvoted comments would address that.
I don’t want people to learn the habit of unhiding comments! Comments that will end up being hidden by default mostly shouldn’t exist. If there’s something amazingly intelligent to say, put it in a top-level comment to begin with, not somewhere it will be hidden by default!
I would simply like to point out the irony of having this discussion in a thread that is hidden by default due to being below a comment currently at −9.
And: Did anyone take a karma hit for this to happen? Or does it turn out that we’re just incentivizing being quick on the trigger—so whoever’s camping out on the site and can get to a comment before its score plummets gets to talk about it and no one else can without accepting the ding?
I paid 5 karma for making this comment. But if everyone in the subthread had to pay 5 karma, or if people below 1000 karma couldn’t participate at all, then this thread would be much smaller. Comments of minor significance, like this one and others, would probably not exist. This ceteris paribus I would see as a loss.
I have taken at least 3 karma hits to talk about this.
Or worse, if someone wants to reply to a comment at −3, they will first upvote it to −2 just to avoid the penalty.
Well, they can undo the up-vote afterwards.
Well upvote the grandparent so that there can be more responses, then.
Round and round it goes …
Meta-discussion is also a horrible slime-dripping cancer on a forum, so I’m okay with nobody ever seeing it again.
Meta-discussion has to occur on fora if fora are going to function. It may be that non-functioning fora have more meta-discussion, but there are obvious correlation v. causation issues.
You have some evidence for this?
In this thread and the perfectly superfluous other thread you made for this topic, I have observed a tendency to state ex cathedra beliefs on the nature of communities and what mechanisms are necessary for their survival.
Only some personal experience and general intuition. I don’t think anyone, even Eliezer, is going to argue that zero meta discussion is optimal. The question then is how much is optimal. It is possible that a weaker version of my statement like starting it with “it seems that” might have been helpful.
I agree that there’s a fair bit of stated beliefs without much evidence all around, although I’m puzzled by your description of the other thread as superfluous.
Do we have any reliable authorities on the sociology of internet forums yet?
I agreed with this as a general principle strongly enough to pay a 5 karma penalty to say so. I don’t think it should be as down voted as it is.
I can’t recall having ever participated in a forum or blog and have the pay offs of meta-discussion be higher than discussing something else. More problematically it is way too engaging than it should be and is an attention sink.
If you really believe meta-discussions are inappropriate, delete the parent comment.
Er, I unhid all comments because I was curious. I know I’ve made my share of hidden comments over my time here. I was so glad when I learned there was the option to get rid of hiding by default.
Whatever you WANT to be the case, it’s just not true that there are no worthwhile comments that end up hidden.
(bit of irony here :P)
Perhaps acceptable casualties.
I for one don’t want a mess of top level comments responding to posts that have been hidden, with no organization. There’s a reason this sort of thing is divided into threads.
Then why don’t the grand-high muckity-mucks just censor the posts honestly? I do not see how that could possibly be less effective than this crowd-sourced star chamber scheme, which manages to be simultaneously opaque, unaccountable, and open to abuse by the trolls it’s supposed to be suppressing.
I agree with this subgoal, but the inconvenience and annoyance of having your whole (good) discussion starting to get punished after it is well underway because of the properties of some grand-grand...-parent comment on an unrelated topic seems like a strong argument against. I think this shouldn’t be done until a way of mitigating this problem is found.
I’d love to have a way to move comments. If anyone’s willing to donate enough money, this site could hire a full-time programmer and have all kinds of amazing new features. Meanwhile the development resources just don’t exist.
Threads with downvoted ancestors were already being punished. They got hidden by default with no warning to commenters that this is the case. Unless people have already learned to unhide by reflex—and then the site has no visual filter mechanism!
That it’s difficult to do this right is not an argument for doing it poorly. My point is that it’ll have a negative effect on net if implemented without thread-moving, with the correct goal of discouraging bad conversations getting obscured by the problem I’ve pointed out. Only if the problem is mitigated (by thread-moving or something else) will it be a good idea to implement what you suggest. If it can’t be mitigated with available resources, then nothing more should be done for now.
How much would part-time or one-off single feature development work cost? If you are going to tell the public that a problem is easily solved with money, you should aim to give the public a sense of the problem’s scope.
A web developer volunteered to help improve the site. Sorry that the link to the volunteer offer goes to a slime-dripping cancer meta thread, but that is where it happens to be. The link. drinks a chaser for my −5 karma points
I reply to you post because the system doesn’t allow me to reply directly to Yudkowsky since I don’t have enough karma (karma can become negative due to downvotes but not by paying the penality, apparently).
You might want to consider splitting LW off SI and operating it a a separate charity, because there might be people who would wish to donate to LW but not to SI.
There seems to be a significant amount of people who browse with anti-kibitzer and full-unhide.
If you want us to stop using such option combinations, maybe putting a warning into preferences would be a reasonable first step?
I’m proceeding to answer anyway. I have karma to burn.
Does the karma subtraction happen if for answers to comments which are −3 or below when the comment is posted, or does that −5 cost come and go depending on the karma of the comment being answered? Or is the loss permanent regardless of what the karma of the comment being answered becomes?
If we distinguish filtering and feedback, that doesn’t work as a disincentive for people who participate.