The distinction between “toll threads” and “closed threads” was an attempt to make the action easier, bear less responsibility and provoke less agitation if applied in controversial cases (it could be un-applied by a moderator as well), so that the button could be more easily given to more people.
Right now the only tool anyone has is the banhammer that either destroys a post with all its comments completely (something I strongly disapprove of being at all possible, but my discussion in the tickets didn’t evoke much support) or needs to be applied in a whac-a-mole manner to each new comment, and neither decision should be made lightly. Since there are no milder measures, nothing at all can be done in milder or more controversial cases. I don’t believe there is much of a fixable-by-moderation signal-to-noise problem right now except for the occasional big bad threads, so most of the motivation for this tool is to make their inhibition more effective than it currently is. Since big bad threads are rare, you don’t need a lot of moderators to address them.
(It’s probably not worth the effort to implement it right now, so bringing it up is mostly motivated as being what I see as a better alternative to the punish-all-subcomments-automatically measure Eliezer was suggesting, although I still expect the current punish-direct-replies to suffice on its own.)
The distinction between “toll threads” and “closed threads” was an attempt to make the action easier, bear less responsibility and provoke less agitation if applied in controversial cases (it could be un-applied by a moderator as well), so that the button could be more easily given to more people.
Right now the only tool anyone has is the banhammer that either destroys a post with all its comments completely (something I strongly disapprove of being at all possible, but my discussion in the tickets didn’t evoke much support) or needs to be applied in a whac-a-mole manner to each new comment, and neither decision should be made lightly. Since there are no milder measures, nothing at all can be done in milder or more controversial cases. I don’t believe there is much of a fixable-by-moderation signal-to-noise problem right now except for the occasional big bad threads, so most of the motivation for this tool is to make their inhibition more effective than it currently is. Since big bad threads are rare, you don’t need a lot of moderators to address them.
(It’s probably not worth the effort to implement it right now, so bringing it up is mostly motivated as being what I see as a better alternative to the punish-all-subcomments-automatically measure Eliezer was suggesting, although I still expect the current punish-direct-replies to suffice on its own.)