I didn’t ban them, and whichever mod did, I support them fully. See Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.
We need the following features on LW:
1) Banned comments no longer appear on user pages. Otherwise spammers have a motive to spam in order to steal pagerank.
2) When a comment is banned or goes to say −4 or below, but not when that comment is deleted, subcomments of it no longer appear in the Recent Comments feed. This will help ensure that stupid discussions ACTUALLY GET PRUNED rather than going on forever.
3) Automatic warning when a user posts a comment falling under 2.
4) Automatic warning when a user tries to delete a comment that already has subcomments, which people seem to do by accident a lot.
I’m not sure 1) is a good idea. As Paul Graham says here.
I think it’s important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they’d know if the editors stopped being honest. HN users can do this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile.
3 and 4 seem reasonable. 1 seems not so. Spam is dealt with pretty well, userpages have very low Google rankings, and external links already have nofollow tags so they don’t add to page rank.
2 seems also problematic because there are conversation threads that start with highly downvoted comments but themselves contain useful remarks.
2 seems also problematic because there are conversation threads that start with highly downvoted comments but themselves contain useful remarks.
Agreed; the automatic warnings (as in (3)) should be enough to remind people that they might be posting in a stupid thread. (Maybe direct replies to a comment below −4 shouldn’t appear in the Recent Comments feed, and perhaps direct replies to anything else posted by the same user within the same thread?)
I support (1), though. It doesn’t seem unreasonable (let alone tyrannical) to allow moderators to delete comments and have them be actually deleted, or actually not-publicly-viewable at least; pretty much all forum software allows that.
The flipside is that the automatic warnings reduces the problems with 2. Once the warning occurs, the discussion can simply be moved to, well, the discussion area. (I’m not begging for new LW functionality, I just mean that when someone sees that waring, they can instead just start something in the discussion area and maybe leave a link in the thread to the new discussion)
Maybe direct replies to a comment below −4 shouldn’t appear in the Recent Comments feed, and perhaps direct replies to anything else posted by the same user within the same thread?
I like the first half of that, but not the second. It is possible to say something stupid and something worthwhile in the same thread, and it would be unneccessarily confusing to have replies to non-downvoted comments not showing up.
I agree with your point about 2. Perhaps subthreads with a comment average above a rather moderate limit should stay in recent comments.
Intuitively, I’d go with 1.5.
I wonder what the average karma for comments is in the past year or so. Now I wonder what the monthly average is—that might be a way of getting a sketchy view of cultural changes in LW, though it wouldn’t tell you whether it’s a change in the quality of comments or the culture of voting.
Now I wonder what the monthly average is—that might be a way of getting a sketchy view of cultural changes in LW, though it wouldn’t tell you whether it’s a change in the quality of comments or the culture of voting.
Or the number of voters. People seem in general to be more likely to vote up than to vote down. If people act roughly like a biased coin then we should expect the average karma to go up as the number of new users increases. Although there are other complicating factors such as the fact that comments can accumulate karma over time. Does the system keep track of when a comment was upvoted or just that someone has been upvoted?
It might help to ask why we want to avoid this. The most obvious reason is that the comments then become not visible to someone scanning the entire thread. If that’s the concern, then that’s a minor issue. Moreover, if that is the cause, then the situation will only become worse if people also can’t see them in the recent comments thread.
Presumably, in the ideal universe, under most circumstances, people will start a new thread to discuss a relevant idea in a highly downvoted prior subthread. But a thread has turned into an actually productive entity, I don’t see how that isn’t a good thing.
If the goal of collapsing downvoted comments is to make it easier for people to find valuable conversations without wasting their time reading downvoted comments, then having valuable conversations downstream of downvoted comments (such that, in order to read the valuable conversation, you also have to read the downvoted comment) subverts that goal.
You’re right, of course, that hiding those comments doesn’t guarantee that valuable conversations won’t wind up downstream of them. But I’d expect it to lower the odds
You’re right, of course, that hiding those comments doesn’t guarantee that valuable conversations won’t wind up downstream of them. But I’d expect it to lower the odds
Karma isn’t synchronous, so the discussion can take place before the parent is downvoted. For example, this thread contains a discussion that probably mostly occurred before Eliezer’s comment was voted down to −4… making this very thread an example of the reason why this shouldn’t be done.
(Among other things, it means you can make an entire thread of conversation vanish by targeting a parent with a few downvotes, which really over-powers downvoters.)
If people are doing this lots, it’s not clear how pruning productive discussion is a good thing other than from something like an urge for tidiness. I see no reason to assume it will spring up elsewhere.
(shrug) If encouraging people to read downvoted-to-oblivion comments is a minus, then there’s a non-tidy benefit. Clearly, people differ in terms of how much they believe it is.
As for the same discussion springing up elsewhere… again, (shrug). If the convention of not having interesting discussions on hidden branches takes hold, and I want to respond to something on a hidden branch, I can respond on an open thread instead. But you’re right that I might not do so.
I didn’t ban them, and whichever mod did, I support them fully. See Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.
We need the following features on LW:
1) Banned comments no longer appear on user pages. Otherwise spammers have a motive to spam in order to steal pagerank.
2) When a comment is banned or goes to say −4 or below, but not when that comment is deleted, subcomments of it no longer appear in the Recent Comments feed. This will help ensure that stupid discussions ACTUALLY GET PRUNED rather than going on forever.
3) Automatic warning when a user posts a comment falling under 2.
4) Automatic warning when a user tries to delete a comment that already has subcomments, which people seem to do by accident a lot.
I’m not sure 1) is a good idea. As Paul Graham says here.
3 and 4 seem reasonable. 1 seems not so. Spam is dealt with pretty well, userpages have very low Google rankings, and external links already have nofollow tags so they don’t add to page rank.
2 seems also problematic because there are conversation threads that start with highly downvoted comments but themselves contain useful remarks.
Agreed; the automatic warnings (as in (3)) should be enough to remind people that they might be posting in a stupid thread. (Maybe direct replies to a comment below −4 shouldn’t appear in the Recent Comments feed, and perhaps direct replies to anything else posted by the same user within the same thread?)
I support (1), though. It doesn’t seem unreasonable (let alone tyrannical) to allow moderators to delete comments and have them be actually deleted, or actually not-publicly-viewable at least; pretty much all forum software allows that.
The flipside is that the automatic warnings reduces the problems with 2. Once the warning occurs, the discussion can simply be moved to, well, the discussion area. (I’m not begging for new LW functionality, I just mean that when someone sees that waring, they can instead just start something in the discussion area and maybe leave a link in the thread to the new discussion)
I like the first half of that, but not the second. It is possible to say something stupid and something worthwhile in the same thread, and it would be unneccessarily confusing to have replies to non-downvoted comments not showing up.
That in itself is problematic—if they were barred from Recent Comments, maybe they’d be moved out from under downvoted comments.
By “moved”, do you mean cut’n’paste, or actual moving?
I mean that people might continue the conversation elsewhere—there’s no mechanism for users to move comments.
I agree with your point about 2. Perhaps subthreads with a comment average above a rather moderate limit should stay in recent comments.
Intuitively, I’d go with 1.5.
I wonder what the average karma for comments is in the past year or so. Now I wonder what the monthly average is—that might be a way of getting a sketchy view of cultural changes in LW, though it wouldn’t tell you whether it’s a change in the quality of comments or the culture of voting.
Or the number of voters. People seem in general to be more likely to vote up than to vote down. If people act roughly like a biased coin then we should expect the average karma to go up as the number of new users increases. Although there are other complicating factors such as the fact that comments can accumulate karma over time. Does the system keep track of when a comment was upvoted or just that someone has been upvoted?
This is the behavior we want to avoid.
It might help to ask why we want to avoid this. The most obvious reason is that the comments then become not visible to someone scanning the entire thread. If that’s the concern, then that’s a minor issue. Moreover, if that is the cause, then the situation will only become worse if people also can’t see them in the recent comments thread.
Presumably, in the ideal universe, under most circumstances, people will start a new thread to discuss a relevant idea in a highly downvoted prior subthread. But a thread has turned into an actually productive entity, I don’t see how that isn’t a good thing.
What am I missing?
If the goal of collapsing downvoted comments is to make it easier for people to find valuable conversations without wasting their time reading downvoted comments, then having valuable conversations downstream of downvoted comments (such that, in order to read the valuable conversation, you also have to read the downvoted comment) subverts that goal.
You’re right, of course, that hiding those comments doesn’t guarantee that valuable conversations won’t wind up downstream of them. But I’d expect it to lower the odds
Karma isn’t synchronous, so the discussion can take place before the parent is downvoted. For example, this thread contains a discussion that probably mostly occurred before Eliezer’s comment was voted down to −4… making this very thread an example of the reason why this shouldn’t be done.
(Among other things, it means you can make an entire thread of conversation vanish by targeting a parent with a few downvotes, which really over-powers downvoters.)
If people are doing this lots, it’s not clear how pruning productive discussion is a good thing other than from something like an urge for tidiness. I see no reason to assume it will spring up elsewhere.
(shrug) If encouraging people to read downvoted-to-oblivion comments is a minus, then there’s a non-tidy benefit. Clearly, people differ in terms of how much they believe it is.
As for the same discussion springing up elsewhere… again, (shrug). If the convention of not having interesting discussions on hidden branches takes hold, and I want to respond to something on a hidden branch, I can respond on an open thread instead. But you’re right that I might not do so.
By the way, I’m enjoying the irony here.
The way to avoid contributing pagerank is rel=nofollow.