As your comment stands now, you are just one point above the reply penalty threshold. You aren’t a troll. I think it illustrates well that the problem with reply penalties isn’t particularly strongly related to trolling. Since the penalty was introduced I have already twice refrained from answering a fairly resonable comment because the comment had less than −3 karma. I have seen no trollish comments for weeks.
Also, the thresholds for “simple majoritarianism” are usually required to be much higher in order to obtain intelligent results. No thresholds should be possible to be reached by three people. Three people could be goons who are being paid to interfere with the LW forum. That then means that if people are disinterested, or those goons are “johnny on the spot” (the one likely characteristic of the real life agents provocateurs I’ve encountered), then legitimate karma is lost.
Of course, karma itself has been abused on this site (and all other karma-using sites), in my opinion. I really like the intuitions of Kevin Kelly, since they’re highly emergence-optimizing, and often genius when it comes to forum design. :) Too bad too few programmers have implemented his well-spring of ideas!
As your comment stands now, you are just one point above the reply penalty threshold. You aren’t a troll. I think it illustrates well that the problem with reply penalties isn’t particularly strongly related to trolling. Since the penalty was introduced I have already twice refrained from answering a fairly resonable comment because the comment had less than −3 karma. I have seen no trollish comments for weeks.
Also, the thresholds for “simple majoritarianism” are usually required to be much higher in order to obtain intelligent results. No thresholds should be possible to be reached by three people. Three people could be goons who are being paid to interfere with the LW forum. That then means that if people are disinterested, or those goons are “johnny on the spot” (the one likely characteristic of the real life agents provocateurs I’ve encountered), then legitimate karma is lost.
Of course, karma itself has been abused on this site (and all other karma-using sites), in my opinion. I really like the intuitions of Kevin Kelly, since they’re highly emergence-optimizing, and often genius when it comes to forum design. :) Too bad too few programmers have implemented his well-spring of ideas!
There you go.