Attractive commentary is insightful and pithy, but forums do not accumulate pith. Forums bloat with redundant observations, misread remarks, and misunderstanding replies unless the community aggressively cull those comments.
Having your comment dismissed is unwelcoming and hurtful. Even if we know that downvotes shouldn’t be hurtful, they are.
Bob writes a comment that doesn’t carry its weight. Alice, a LW reader, can choose to up-vote, down-vote, or Dismiss Bob’s comment. Dismiss advises the community that a commentent may not be worth reading, but does not notify the comment’s author (Bob).
Anyone who Dismissed Bob’s comment would see it as folded (or even removed)
Bob would not see his commment as folded.
Anyone else who didn’t dismiss Bob’s comment might or might not see it folded, depending on their (“Don’t show me comments with a score less than x”) preferences.:
For the purposes of Karma folding, Alice’s dissmiss would count as if it were −1 karma. If Bob’s comment had a karma score of 1 and was Dismissed once, users who fold comments with scores of 0 would see Bob’s comment as folded.
If Bob’s comment were for Alice’s article, Alice’s Dismiss would count as if it were −3 karma for the purposes of comment folding. This allows article authors quickly nip off-topic commentary.
If Bob dissmissed his own comment, it would also count as if it were −3 karma.
The total number of times Bob’s comment was Dismissed would be invisible to all users. If he really wanted to, Bob could set up a puppet account, vary the (“Don’t show me comments with a score less than x”) field until his comment was folded, and from that infer the number of dismisses on that comment. If Bob does that, I don’t particularly care if his feelings are hurt.
Upvoted for a good analysis of the problem, but I think the proposed solution would make the forum worse, not better—it makes the system more complex (more buttons, more states a comment can be in), and more prone to abuses (dismissing as censorship), and drama and complaints about people abusing the feature even if they are not.
Comments don’t have to be “bad” to be worth hiding—they can just be “not very good” or “not very good anymore” . The fastest way to improve a document is to remove the least good parts, even if those parts aren’t “bad”. Many comments are necessary at the time, but fluffy afterwards (“By foo do you mean bar?”, “No, I meant baz, and have edited my original post to make that clear”, “OK, then I withdraw my objection”). If two people independently offer the same exact brilliant insight, we’d should still hide one of them. There are no shortage of times I’d like to hide a comment without discouraging or punishing the author.
That, in effect, sets up a parallel karma system. There is the normal karma, visible and both up- and downvotable. And then there is the karma of dismissal which is unseen and can only go down but never can go up.
Besides that, the system implies personal “hide-this” flags for all comments. The Dismiss button, then, does two things simultaneously: sets the hide-this flag for the comment and decreases the comment’s dismissal karma.
Problem:
Attractive commentary is insightful and pithy, but forums do not accumulate pith. Forums bloat with redundant observations, misread remarks, and misunderstanding replies unless the community aggressively cull those comments.
Having your comment dismissed is unwelcoming and hurtful. Even if we know that downvotes shouldn’t be hurtful, they are.
Inspiration:
This thread.
Proposal:
Dismiss comment button
Bob writes a comment that doesn’t carry its weight. Alice, a LW reader, can choose to up-vote, down-vote, or Dismiss Bob’s comment. Dismiss advises the community that a commentent may not be worth reading, but does not notify the comment’s author (Bob).
Anyone who Dismissed Bob’s comment would see it as folded (or even removed)
Bob would not see his commment as folded.
Anyone else who didn’t dismiss Bob’s comment might or might not see it folded, depending on their (“Don’t show me comments with a score less than x”) preferences.:
For the purposes of Karma folding, Alice’s dissmiss would count as if it were −1 karma. If Bob’s comment had a karma score of 1 and was Dismissed once, users who fold comments with scores of 0 would see Bob’s comment as folded.
If Bob’s comment were for Alice’s article, Alice’s Dismiss would count as if it were −3 karma for the purposes of comment folding. This allows article authors quickly nip off-topic commentary.
If Bob dissmissed his own comment, it would also count as if it were −3 karma.
The total number of times Bob’s comment was Dismissed would be invisible to all users. If he really wanted to, Bob could set up a puppet account, vary the (“Don’t show me comments with a score less than x”) field until his comment was folded, and from that infer the number of dismisses on that comment. If Bob does that, I don’t particularly care if his feelings are hurt.
Upvoted for a good analysis of the problem, but I think the proposed solution would make the forum worse, not better—it makes the system more complex (more buttons, more states a comment can be in), and more prone to abuses (dismissing as censorship), and drama and complaints about people abusing the feature even if they are not.
negative karma that doesn’t discourage the poster from making further similar comments is almost pointless.
Comments don’t have to be “bad” to be worth hiding—they can just be “not very good” or “not very good anymore” . The fastest way to improve a document is to remove the least good parts, even if those parts aren’t “bad”. Many comments are necessary at the time, but fluffy afterwards (“By foo do you mean bar?”, “No, I meant baz, and have edited my original post to make that clear”, “OK, then I withdraw my objection”). If two people independently offer the same exact brilliant insight, we’d should still hide one of them. There are no shortage of times I’d like to hide a comment without discouraging or punishing the author.
That, in effect, sets up a parallel karma system. There is the normal karma, visible and both up- and downvotable. And then there is the karma of dismissal which is unseen and can only go down but never can go up.
Besides that, the system implies personal “hide-this” flags for all comments. The Dismiss button, then, does two things simultaneously: sets the hide-this flag for the comment and decreases the comment’s dismissal karma.
That would be the little minimise button in the corner.