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?
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.