Given that the user in question was trolling and had all comments reduced to very negative values, what most likely happened is that the user was banned. Sometimes when users are banned the most insulting or trolliish comments are deleted when the user is banned. Note also that all the comments are available here. Considering the level of insulting vitriol in the comments, outright deletion seems like a completely reasonable response.
I don’t think comments that say things like:
Long time lurker—why you even bother arguing with Cryonics people—they are a delusional cult, technophilliacs who barely understand what cryonics ACTUALLY IS but they are still selling it to others. Bwowk is one of the main guys in the cryogame who writes tonnes of litreture to twist up the heads of people with a 140 IQ and make them belive that they have made the right choice with cryonics. He has been doing it for years and years—Melody is not wrong about 1 million words
is at all helping the signal to noise ratio.
For what it is worth, calm, careful negative comments about cryonics are generally accepted. See for example my comment in this thread.
Deletion of comments by richiekgb is simply letting the eldest Billy Goat Gruff do his job.
Richie may be a troll, but there are those who seem to take him seriously and applaud his efforts. He doesn’t seem to be a deliberate troll, just an over-emotional jerk who is genuinely upset about cryonics. I realize we need to have a filter in place to keep the SNR good, but I thought the karma system was probably sufficient in this case. I could be wrong though; I don’t have any experience with moderating a forum personally.
Richie may be a troll, but there are those who seem to take him seriously and applaud his efforts
If some fan of Jack Chick came here preaching about how we needed to accept Jesus Christ as our personal lord and savior would you care about the fact that the person was sincere and that millions of people in the United States think he is correct? Sincerity cannot be a test of whether content is worth keeping. Nor can the presence of people who happen to agree be a useful test. (Incidentally can someone explain why Richie seems to see some sort of connection between cryonics and modern day satanism? I don’t follow this train of thought...)
This still doesn’t answer the question: why isn’t down voting good enough? I’d rather rely mostly on community moderation rather than a few specialized moderators.
As a side note, perhaps users with sufficiently negative karma should have their comments hidden by default?
The main issue isn’t that downvoting isn’t good enough but that we don’t want to terribly damage the signal to noise ratio. Thus, we don’t want massive amounts of spam or trolling in threads, even if it has been downvoted. But this argument is fairly weak. If users could be banned without having comments deleted that would solve the primary problem.
There’s a prominent cryonics advocate and organizer in the UK who has recently begun his own stabilization organization. He also happens to be a member of the Church of Satan and the Temple of Vampire (the latter of which is apparently a transhumanist group with some kind of vampire pretensions).
I am a lot less interested in David Styles’ pseudo-religious hobbies than I am in the accusation that EUCrio does not have the staffing resources and response capabilities it claims to have. Has there been a rebuttal to that?
Richie is not a troll, he’s been perfectly nice in person, completely sincere and identifies as a futurist. However he really doesn’t seem to have any problem with acting like a total jerk online.
A troll really is about online acts. In person behavior isn’t actually relevant. I would guess that most rolls are perfectly reasonable people in person. (While I do think it is possible to be an accidental troll, by spawning huge acrimonious and pointless threads without intending, but the disruption is still as much of a problem when it happens.)
“Troll” implies malign motives. Someone can be a massive dick with complete sincerity.
But we don’t actually care about motivation, we care about stupidity.
Personally I suspect leaving the comments of the poster in question visible, buried in a slag heap at −12, is just fine. You have to want to look, and examples of blithering stupidity are often useful as teachable examples.
Actually, I think it would work if the tag that indicates number of replies to a downvoted-to-oblivion post also had the average karma for the thread. This would give a fast way to judge whether the thread would be worth reading.
Given that the user in question was trolling and had all comments reduced to very negative values, what most likely happened is that the user was banned. Sometimes when users are banned the most insulting or trolliish comments are deleted when the user is banned. Note also that all the comments are available here. Considering the level of insulting vitriol in the comments, outright deletion seems like a completely reasonable response. I don’t think comments that say things like:
is at all helping the signal to noise ratio.
For what it is worth, calm, careful negative comments about cryonics are generally accepted. See for example my comment in this thread.
Deletion of comments by richiekgb is simply letting the eldest Billy Goat Gruff do his job.
Richie may be a troll, but there are those who seem to take him seriously and applaud his efforts. He doesn’t seem to be a deliberate troll, just an over-emotional jerk who is genuinely upset about cryonics. I realize we need to have a filter in place to keep the SNR good, but I thought the karma system was probably sufficient in this case. I could be wrong though; I don’t have any experience with moderating a forum personally.
If some fan of Jack Chick came here preaching about how we needed to accept Jesus Christ as our personal lord and savior would you care about the fact that the person was sincere and that millions of people in the United States think he is correct? Sincerity cannot be a test of whether content is worth keeping. Nor can the presence of people who happen to agree be a useful test. (Incidentally can someone explain why Richie seems to see some sort of connection between cryonics and modern day satanism? I don’t follow this train of thought...)
This still doesn’t answer the question: why isn’t down voting good enough? I’d rather rely mostly on community moderation rather than a few specialized moderators.
As a side note, perhaps users with sufficiently negative karma should have their comments hidden by default?
The main issue isn’t that downvoting isn’t good enough but that we don’t want to terribly damage the signal to noise ratio. Thus, we don’t want massive amounts of spam or trolling in threads, even if it has been downvoted. But this argument is fairly weak. If users could be banned without having comments deleted that would solve the primary problem.
There’s a prominent cryonics advocate and organizer in the UK who has recently begun his own stabilization organization. He also happens to be a member of the Church of Satan and the Temple of Vampire (the latter of which is apparently a transhumanist group with some kind of vampire pretensions).
I am a lot less interested in David Styles’ pseudo-religious hobbies than I am in the accusation that EUCrio does not have the staffing resources and response capabilities it claims to have. Has there been a rebuttal to that?
There’s been an attempted rebuttal at least. That thread was active as a couple of days ago.
Given that I have David Styles’s phone number on a card in my wallet with emergency instructions above it, I’d love a link—cheers!
It’s in the same SA thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/343/suspended_animation_inc_accused_of_incompetence/2yzr?c=1 Melanie disputes it
Hmm, can’t find very much specific discussion of David Styles or EUCRio in there.
The fact that Melody Maxim takes Richie seriously changes my opinion of her a lot more than it does of him.
Richie is not a troll, he’s been perfectly nice in person, completely sincere and identifies as a futurist. However he really doesn’t seem to have any problem with acting like a total jerk online.
A troll really is about online acts. In person behavior isn’t actually relevant. I would guess that most rolls are perfectly reasonable people in person. (While I do think it is possible to be an accidental troll, by spawning huge acrimonious and pointless threads without intending, but the disruption is still as much of a problem when it happens.)
“Troll” implies malign motives. Someone can be a massive dick with complete sincerity.
But we don’t actually care about motivation, we care about stupidity.
Personally I suspect leaving the comments of the poster in question visible, buried in a slag heap at −12, is just fine. You have to want to look, and examples of blithering stupidity are often useful as teachable examples.
Actually, I think it would work if the tag that indicates number of replies to a downvoted-to-oblivion post also had the average karma for the thread. This would give a fast way to judge whether the thread would be worth reading.