Someone might argue that “the commentariat on LesserWrong are a group of people who are more nitpicky and less helpful than my friends on Facebook”. I’m not sure if this is a strawman.
But I’d like to propose, instead, that the comments being posted on LesserWrong are the result of people responding to incentives imposed by the karma system. For whatever reason, it appears that these incentives are leading people to post nitpicky and unhelpful comments. Improving the karma system might fix the incentives.
You’ve suggested elsewhere that the post owner might move irrelevant comments to an “off-topic” section, and that’s a good way to deal with off-topic comments. But what if a comment is directly replying to my post, but I just sort of feel like it’s nitpicky and unhelpful? I could mark it as “off-topic”, but this wouldn’t be strictly accurate.
Instead, I’d propose letting the post owner mark certain comments as “helpful”, which would be worth +10 karma, or would double the value of all karma received, or it would sort those posts to the top where more people would see them, or something.
I do think the karma system is contributing to this, and I do want to explore ways to modify that. I am happy about more suggestions to do so.
I am skeptical of the owner of a post marking comments as “helpful” or “unhelpful” since this gives people who write top-level posts suddenly drastically more power than people who don’t, even at similar levels of karma. I do think that giving moderators or very-high-karma users the ability to special-upvote or special-downvote something might work out (we’ve been planning on adding karma rewards to the moderator toolkit for a while now, and think this can indeed be used to combat this problem).
Let me say that a little more clearly:
Someone might argue that “the commentariat on LesserWrong are a group of people who are more nitpicky and less helpful than my friends on Facebook”. I’m not sure if this is a strawman.
But I’d like to propose, instead, that the comments being posted on LesserWrong are the result of people responding to incentives imposed by the karma system. For whatever reason, it appears that these incentives are leading people to post nitpicky and unhelpful comments. Improving the karma system might fix the incentives.
You’ve suggested elsewhere that the post owner might move irrelevant comments to an “off-topic” section, and that’s a good way to deal with off-topic comments. But what if a comment is directly replying to my post, but I just sort of feel like it’s nitpicky and unhelpful? I could mark it as “off-topic”, but this wouldn’t be strictly accurate.
Instead, I’d propose letting the post owner mark certain comments as “helpful”, which would be worth +10 karma, or would double the value of all karma received, or it would sort those posts to the top where more people would see them, or something.
I do think the karma system is contributing to this, and I do want to explore ways to modify that. I am happy about more suggestions to do so.
I am skeptical of the owner of a post marking comments as “helpful” or “unhelpful” since this gives people who write top-level posts suddenly drastically more power than people who don’t, even at similar levels of karma. I do think that giving moderators or very-high-karma users the ability to special-upvote or special-downvote something might work out (we’ve been planning on adding karma rewards to the moderator toolkit for a while now, and think this can indeed be used to combat this problem).