Basing any action on 30-day karma seems unfair in this case. There was a relatively short window during which the comments were being downvoted, and now they’re banned; typically for a controversial topic, those would have been reversed by upvotes over the next week. I don’t know if that would have happened in this case, but now we’ll never know.
Systematically downvoted comments indicate some sort of failure mode, even when it’s not the failure mode of being wrong, or when it’s a failure mode on the part of downvoters. It’s usually possible to reframe the debate in a more constructive manner, long before you get remotely close to start getting banned. I’m not aware of any cases where persisting in highly downvoted behavior on LW achieved anything, apart from some unpleasantness (more unpleasantness the more the behavior persists).
I might agree with you about this in most cases, but that does not really ameliorate the problem of unfairness I referenced. If those comments were not banned and you showed up tomorrow, for example, eridu might not have made the list.
Perhaps notably, if I were aware that Eridu’s downvotes would result in banning of his comments, then I might have correctively upvoted his comments so that they would not be banned, since I do believe there were some valuable pieces in that discussion. Though I don’t know if we want to encourage my sort of behavior.
Basing any action on 30-day karma seems unfair in this case. There was a relatively short window during which the comments were being downvoted, and now they’re banned; typically for a controversial topic, those would have been reversed by upvotes over the next week. I don’t know if that would have happened in this case, but now we’ll never know.
Systematically downvoted comments indicate some sort of failure mode, even when it’s not the failure mode of being wrong, or when it’s a failure mode on the part of downvoters. It’s usually possible to reframe the debate in a more constructive manner, long before you get remotely close to start getting banned. I’m not aware of any cases where persisting in highly downvoted behavior on LW achieved anything, apart from some unpleasantness (more unpleasantness the more the behavior persists).
I might agree with you about this in most cases, but that does not really ameliorate the problem of unfairness I referenced. If those comments were not banned and you showed up tomorrow, for example, eridu might not have made the list.
Perhaps notably, if I were aware that Eridu’s downvotes would result in banning of his comments, then I might have correctively upvoted his comments so that they would not be banned, since I do believe there were some valuable pieces in that discussion. Though I don’t know if we want to encourage my sort of behavior.