Irrespective of this particular comment, as a rule of thumb outright removing comments that were probably submitted in good faith is harmful from a community standpoint. Among other things, it discourages judicious self-policing among the users, makes approval/disapproval seem more capricious and arbitrary, and is less scalable.
Assuming the goal is a user community-driven site, removal by administrative fiat should be reserved for blatantly disruptive comments: content-free trolling, flooding, &c. If, in your judgement, this comment crossed that line that’s fine; but I encourage you to be cautious about policy here and to err on the side of non-intervention.
You’re right—while I don’t think it was spam, by the usual definition (I don’t see a copy of that comment on every post, for example), spam is definitely a category of things worth deleting and/or developing a mechanism to block. So it’s on your judgement.
I composed this specifically for LessWrong—so how can this be spam ?
That is really unfair. Perhaps I should have spoken more directly to the use of rhetoric, but in the field of global warming, the big discussion now is rhetoric and the denial of reason.
I will say that my writing is passionate, direct, but not spam. Perhaps you need another category for rejecting an uncomfortable comment.
The problem with the comment was not that it was uncomfortable. It was that it was basically a rant and a bunch of links to sites about your particular political affiliation, which was not the topic of this post.
Even a discussion about how the global warming debate has devolved into mere rhetoric would be only tangentially related to this post and likely would have been voted down for being off-topic.
Bwahaha : rpauli now has karma 4294967286, which is 2^32 − 10, from which we can conclude that his actual karma score is −10, and that lesswrong encodes karma in unsigned 32-bit integers.
(Yes, I’m one of the theoretical python volunteers, I just haven’t got reddit to work right on my machine yet … but I’m nearly there!)
Crossed the line into spam IMO, but if anyone agrees with thomblake they can vote me down further and I’ll unban the comment and you can downvote it.
Irrespective of this particular comment, as a rule of thumb outright removing comments that were probably submitted in good faith is harmful from a community standpoint. Among other things, it discourages judicious self-policing among the users, makes approval/disapproval seem more capricious and arbitrary, and is less scalable.
Assuming the goal is a user community-driven site, removal by administrative fiat should be reserved for blatantly disruptive comments: content-free trolling, flooding, &c. If, in your judgement, this comment crossed that line that’s fine; but I encourage you to be cautious about policy here and to err on the side of non-intervention.
You’re right—while I don’t think it was spam, by the usual definition (I don’t see a copy of that comment on every post, for example), spam is definitely a category of things worth deleting and/or developing a mechanism to block. So it’s on your judgement.
I composed this specifically for LessWrong—so how can this be spam ?
That is really unfair. Perhaps I should have spoken more directly to the use of rhetoric, but in the field of global warming, the big discussion now is rhetoric and the denial of reason.
I will say that my writing is passionate, direct, but not spam. Perhaps you need another category for rejecting an uncomfortable comment.
The problem with the comment was not that it was uncomfortable. It was that it was basically a rant and a bunch of links to sites about your particular political affiliation, which was not the topic of this post.
Even a discussion about how the global warming debate has devolved into mere rhetoric would be only tangentially related to this post and likely would have been voted down for being off-topic.
Bwahaha : rpauli now has karma 4294967286, which is 2^32 − 10, from which we can conclude that his actual karma score is −10, and that lesswrong encodes karma in unsigned 32-bit integers.
(Yes, I’m one of the theoretical python volunteers, I just haven’t got reddit to work right on my machine yet … but I’m nearly there!)
s/64/32/g above.
Dammit!
… uh, I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Okay, comment’s back. We need two more downvotes to make it disappear for most users, so get minusy.