Yes, reducing the total amount of replies is a feature. Reducing the amount of good replies (and/or the diversity of replies) is a bug. Making it easy to make a mistake is a major bug. Too many people don’t bother to understand a post before they upvote or downvote it—they go with their initial prejudices. To form a coherent reply requires reading and understanding a post—assuming, of course, it is a post with substance (which is why I “complain” about substanceless posts).
Look at my most recent post here. It’s down to −5 and has exactly one pretty useless comment. I have gotten some really good criticism. I’ve also had posts where the only comments are endless repetitions of “he is obviously making this assumption”—regardless of how many times I say, “No, I don’t believe that. I am deriving my point from this other direction.” (Though, I must also admit that some of my original replies were not that clear, courteous, or cool-headed ;-)
It seems as though you don’t like karma systems. But surely they do much more good than bad. Poor karma has precious few consequences around here. Maybe there should be more—like throttling comments.
Yes, reducing the total amount of replies is a feature. Reducing the amount of good replies (and/or the diversity of replies) is a bug. Making it easy to make a mistake is a major bug. Too many people don’t bother to understand a post before they upvote or downvote it—they go with their initial prejudices. To form a coherent reply requires reading and understanding a post—assuming, of course, it is a post with substance (which is why I “complain” about substanceless posts).
Look at my most recent post here. It’s down to −5 and has exactly one pretty useless comment. I have gotten some really good criticism. I’ve also had posts where the only comments are endless repetitions of “he is obviously making this assumption”—regardless of how many times I say, “No, I don’t believe that. I am deriving my point from this other direction.” (Though, I must also admit that some of my original replies were not that clear, courteous, or cool-headed ;-)
It seems as though you don’t like karma systems. But surely they do much more good than bad. Poor karma has precious few consequences around here. Maybe there should be more—like throttling comments.
Downvoted, because a comment suggesting “throttling comments” is exactly the kind of comment I would like to throttle. :P