I don’t think “how bad something is” is the right dimension that determines whether sneering is appropriate, so I don’t think there is a strict level of “badness” that makes sneering OK. I do think there are situations where it’s appropriate, though very few on LW. Brainstorming some hypothetical situations:
An author showed up posting some LLM slop that didn’t get caught in our content review. A user explains why the LLM slop doesn’t make any sense. The author responds with more LLM slop comments. It seems pretty reasonable to rudely dismiss the author who posted the LLM slop (though my guess is culturally it would still be better to do it with less of a sneering motion, but I wouldn’t fault someone very much for it, and rudeness seems very appropriate).
If an organizational account was around that kept posting comments and posts that said things like “we (organization X) do not support this kind of work” and did other kind of markety things, and someone had already written about why intellectual discourse with organizational accounts doesn’t really make much sense, then I think I can imagine reacting with sneering to be appropriate (though mostly the right choice is of course to just ban that kind of stuff at the moderation level)
Maybe that helps? I don’t know, there are not that many circumstances where it feels like the right choice. Mostly where I’ve seen cultures of sneering things tend to go off the rails quite badly, and it’s one of the worst attractors in internet culture space.
I don’t think “how bad something is” is the right dimension that determines whether sneering is appropriate, so I don’t think there is a strict level of “badness” that makes sneering OK. I do think there are situations where it’s appropriate, though very few on LW. Brainstorming some hypothetical situations:
An author showed up posting some LLM slop that didn’t get caught in our content review. A user explains why the LLM slop doesn’t make any sense. The author responds with more LLM slop comments. It seems pretty reasonable to rudely dismiss the author who posted the LLM slop (though my guess is culturally it would still be better to do it with less of a sneering motion, but I wouldn’t fault someone very much for it, and rudeness seems very appropriate).
If an organizational account was around that kept posting comments and posts that said things like “we (organization X) do not support this kind of work” and did other kind of markety things, and someone had already written about why intellectual discourse with organizational accounts doesn’t really make much sense, then I think I can imagine reacting with sneering to be appropriate (though mostly the right choice is of course to just ban that kind of stuff at the moderation level)
Maybe that helps? I don’t know, there are not that many circumstances where it feels like the right choice. Mostly where I’ve seen cultures of sneering things tend to go off the rails quite badly, and it’s one of the worst attractors in internet culture space.