Just a note—don’t take Jack’s advice to not self-censor too literally. There is much weirdness in you, and even the borders of this place would groan under its weight.
The above (below? Depends on your settings, I guess) comment, which is now hidden, involves a poll, and would not (I predict) have otherwise become hidden.
It’s also hidden depending on your settings: you can change the threshold for hiding comments as well. I don’t hide any comments, because seeing a hidden comment makes me so curious I have to click it, and just draws more attention to it for me.
lol, it was sooo tempting to edit that comment and replace the word “penises” with “ice cream”. I guess that would be the reverse of one of the standard internet pranks.
But I didn’t do that, because the negative value from the confusion caused to anyone else reading this thread would probably have outweighed any positive value from the prank being funny.
though, um… please upvote this comment if you want me to go ahead and swap the words “penises” and “ice cream”, in both the previous comment and this comment...
or please downvote this comment if you think that’s a bad idea.
I didn’t upvote or downvote any of these. But I think the result would be the same if you had said “ice cream”: the point is that it’s a completely random comment that has nothing to do with the rationality discussion and distracts from the flow. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with randomness or silliness but interrupting a rationality conversation with completely unrelated comments could get annoying.
Doing polls for this kind of thing, while somewhat interesting in a meta sense (I definitely like to see discussion about the social norms here), is rather off-topic. It would be less disruptive if you were to start by sticking to the already established norms (which can be learned by observing, and which you can ask me or Alicorn or Blueberry about via IM if you have questions), and occasionally break from the norms to test how other habits of yours are received.
ow. my karma is taking a hit. I should have expected that. And I should have set up another karma-balancing comment. I guess you can use this comment for karma balancing. That means if you voted another comment down, vote this one up, and vice versa.
So far I lost about 10 karma as a result of all these polls. Hopefully that will help reduce the emotional impact of future losses of karma, which would help me get over the paranoia about my comments causing more harm than good. And yes, I do plan to occasionally post comments that I suspect will be downvoted. But not too often, I’m not quite that reckless.
If you are going to make polls like that, the Open Thread is probably a better place to do it. There they won’t distract from the main topic of conversation.
And I’m glad that you’re not scared to post or get downvoted! :)
I agree. But at least that first poll got enough downvotes to block off all the others, for anyone who didn’t disable the feature that auto-hides comments with less than −3 karma.
Thanks. Actually, the reason why I said “I guess I had better stop writing now” is because this comment was already getting too long.
Just a note—don’t take Jack’s advice to not self-censor too literally. There is much weirdness in you, and even the borders of this place would groan under its weight.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The above (below? Depends on your settings, I guess) comment, which is now hidden, involves a poll, and would not (I predict) have otherwise become hidden.
It’s also hidden depending on your settings: you can change the threshold for hiding comments as well. I don’t hide any comments, because seeing a hidden comment makes me so curious I have to click it, and just draws more attention to it for me.
hehe, thanks, yeah, I am well aware that I have lots of weirdness, and that letting all of it out freely is usually not a good idea.
Though as a random experiment...
please downvote this comment if you think that randomly saying stuff like “I like penises” is inappropriate for LW.
ok, thought so.
thanks.
please upvote this comment if you want to balance out the effects of this experiment on my karma.
lol, it was sooo tempting to edit that comment and replace the word “penises” with “ice cream”. I guess that would be the reverse of one of the standard internet pranks.
But I didn’t do that, because the negative value from the confusion caused to anyone else reading this thread would probably have outweighed any positive value from the prank being funny.
though, um… please upvote this comment if you want me to go ahead and swap the words “penises” and “ice cream”, in both the previous comment and this comment...
or please downvote this comment if you think that’s a bad idea.
I didn’t upvote or downvote any of these. But I think the result would be the same if you had said “ice cream”: the point is that it’s a completely random comment that has nothing to do with the rationality discussion and distracts from the flow. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with randomness or silliness but interrupting a rationality conversation with completely unrelated comments could get annoying.
ok, that makes sense.
thanks for the feedback
hugs :)
oh, and, um… please downvote this comment if hugs or other public displays of affection are considered inappropriate for LW.
or please upvote this comment if public displays of affection are considered appropriate, if they’re tasteful and not too distracting.
Despite the negative status of this poll, a quick “Thanks hugs :)” is perfectly appropriate for LW.
hehe, so… 16 downvotes… is that a new record? :)
(I’m guessing a >50% probability that it’s not...)
If I consider this as an achievement to be proud of, does that make me a troll?
Doing polls for this kind of thing, while somewhat interesting in a meta sense (I definitely like to see discussion about the social norms here), is rather off-topic. It would be less disruptive if you were to start by sticking to the already established norms (which can be learned by observing, and which you can ask me or Alicorn or Blueberry about via IM if you have questions), and occasionally break from the norms to test how other habits of yours are received.
hmm, good point.
heh, but now what I naturally want to say is:
please upvote this comment if you want to see more polls like this
or please downvote this comment if you want to see less polls like this
though of course you’re welcome to ignore this comment, and not vote at all.
ow. my karma is taking a hit. I should have expected that. And I should have set up another karma-balancing comment. I guess you can use this comment for karma balancing. That means if you voted another comment down, vote this one up, and vice versa.
So far I lost about 10 karma as a result of all these polls. Hopefully that will help reduce the emotional impact of future losses of karma, which would help me get over the paranoia about my comments causing more harm than good. And yes, I do plan to occasionally post comments that I suspect will be downvoted. But not too often, I’m not quite that reckless.
If you are going to make polls like that, the Open Thread is probably a better place to do it. There they won’t distract from the main topic of conversation.
And I’m glad that you’re not scared to post or get downvoted! :)
I agree. But at least that first poll got enough downvotes to block off all the others, for anyone who didn’t disable the feature that auto-hides comments with less than −3 karma.