I concur; the points-values attached to individual comments have a larger impact on what LW-readers see than do users’ karma values, and are therefore more important to retain as accurate indicators of comment quality.
If a particular user has a pattern of making comments that impair LW in a particular way, you might explicitly comment on this, rhollerith, with detailed, concrete language describing what the pattern is, what specific comments fit that pattern, and why it may impair LW conversation. You could do this by public comment or private message. This has the following advantages over blanket user-downvoting:
It does not impair quality-indicators on the user’s other comments;
The user can understand where you are coming from, and so can integrate information instead of just finding it unfair;
It publicly states community norms (in the public-message version), and so may help others of us retool our comments in more useful ways as well (as well as making us less likely to feel there are random invisible grudges disrupting LW karma);
If you are mistaken about what is and is not useful, others can respond by explicitly sharing conflicting impressions.
ETA: My comment here was slightly mis-directed, in that Hollerith above said he would send the user a message explaining his reasoning.
JGWeissman writes, “I don’t see what you gain by this strategy that justifies the decrease in correlation between a comments displayed karma score and the value the community assigns it that occurs when you down vote a comment not because it is a problem, but because the author had written other comments that are a problem.”
Vladimir Nesov writes, “If you are downvoting indiscriminately, not separating the better comments from the worse ones, without even bothering to understand them, you are abusing the system.”
Anna writes, “This has the following advantages over blanket user-downvoting: . . . It does not impair quality-indicators on the user’s other comments”
The objection is valid. I retract my proposal and will say so in an addendum to my original comment.
The problem with my proposal is the part where the voter goes to a commenter’s lesswrong.com/user/ page and votes down 20 or 30 or so comments in a row. That dilutes or cancels out useful information, namely, votes from those who used the system the way it was intended.
If there were a way for a voter to reduce the karma of a person without reducing the point-score of any substantive comment, then my proposal might still have value, but without that, my proposal will have a destructive effect on the community, so of course I withdraw my proposal.
the points-values attached to individual comments have a larger impact on what LW-readers see than do users’ karma value
True, but if the behavior of the voters change so that the former becomes less informative, the site will tend to change so that the user’s karma will come to have a larger impact. In competent software development, changes in people’s behavior will cause maor changes in the software more often than changes in the software will cause major changes in the behavior of people. (Consequently, assuming the software developers are competent, most changes to the system are best initiated as changes to behavior rather than changes to the software—and if the software developers are not competent, then the site is probably doomed anyway.) Or so it seems to me.
I concur; the points-values attached to individual comments have a larger impact on what LW-readers see than do users’ karma values, and are therefore more important to retain as accurate indicators of comment quality.
If a particular user has a pattern of making comments that impair LW in a particular way, you might explicitly comment on this, rhollerith, with detailed, concrete language describing what the pattern is, what specific comments fit that pattern, and why it may impair LW conversation. You could do this by public comment or private message. This has the following advantages over blanket user-downvoting:
It does not impair quality-indicators on the user’s other comments;
The user can understand where you are coming from, and so can integrate information instead of just finding it unfair;
It publicly states community norms (in the public-message version), and so may help others of us retool our comments in more useful ways as well (as well as making us less likely to feel there are random invisible grudges disrupting LW karma);
If you are mistaken about what is and is not useful, others can respond by explicitly sharing conflicting impressions.
ETA: My comment here was slightly mis-directed, in that Hollerith above said he would send the user a message explaining his reasoning.
JGWeissman writes, “I don’t see what you gain by this strategy that justifies the decrease in correlation between a comments displayed karma score and the value the community assigns it that occurs when you down vote a comment not because it is a problem, but because the author had written other comments that are a problem.”
Vladimir Nesov writes, “If you are downvoting indiscriminately, not separating the better comments from the worse ones, without even bothering to understand them, you are abusing the system.”
Anna writes, “This has the following advantages over blanket user-downvoting: . . . It does not impair quality-indicators on the user’s other comments”
The objection is valid. I retract my proposal and will say so in an addendum to my original comment.
The problem with my proposal is the part where the voter goes to a commenter’s lesswrong.com/user/ page and votes down 20 or 30 or so comments in a row. That dilutes or cancels out useful information, namely, votes from those who used the system the way it was intended.
If there were a way for a voter to reduce the karma of a person without reducing the point-score of any substantive comment, then my proposal might still have value, but without that, my proposal will have a destructive effect on the community, so of course I withdraw my proposal.
True, but if the behavior of the voters change so that the former becomes less informative, the site will tend to change so that the user’s karma will come to have a larger impact. In competent software development, changes in people’s behavior will cause maor changes in the software more often than changes in the software will cause major changes in the behavior of people. (Consequently, assuming the software developers are competent, most changes to the system are best initiated as changes to behavior rather than changes to the software—and if the software developers are not competent, then the site is probably doomed anyway.) Or so it seems to me.