FYI, I downvoted for the comment deletion. (I have no idea what your comments said, because I only saw them after the edit.) I object to deleting comments after you’ve posted them and had them replied to—I consider it to be disruptive and non-cooperative, basically a defection against the other forum participants. (With exceptions for, like, “whoops I accidentally said some information that I didn’t mean to make public”, or whatever. But even then a targeted info-removing edit is the ideal way.)
Ditto. Gears, I didn’t downvote your comments until you deleted them. It’s now hard to see why I wrote what I did. I think that’s bad form.
That said, I read you (Gears) as being overwhelmed here. I’m guessing you wanted to delete your comments because you’re both hurting and feeling unseen/unsupported. Pulling out, including deleting your comments, totally makes sense to me in that context I’m imagining you in.
In the future, if you have to do that, I think it would be kinder to make some kind of note about that in the deleted comment.
Even better would be to use strikethrough with a comment saying something like “This is beyond my capacity to keep engaging in, I’ll leave this here so others can understand the exchange, but I’m checking out and ask not to be pulled in or expected to reply.”
But I also recognize this is an intense and painful topic for you. I understand if all of those options are out of emotional range for you.
But in case they’re not out of range in the future, that’d at least have avoided my and Said’s downvotes!
[deleted due to going below zero, in order to disengage myself from a conversation that was pushing me into a bad mental state. Please do not reply further to my comments here; I wish lesswrong had “mute replies”. I am now rate limited to one post per day because of mass downvoting on four comments.]
Edit: in this comment I said deleting a comment isn’t defecting if it’s after a mass downvote, what I meant was that it’s legitimate response to being downvoted unjustly, when my comment was expressing a reasonable opinion.
When I downvote a comment it is basically never because I want the author to delete that comment. I rarely downvote comments already bellow 0, but even when I do it is not because I wish the comment was deleted.
Instead, it mostly means that I dislike the way in which that comment was written and thought out; that I don’t want people to have that style / approach when commenting. This correlates with me disagreeing with the position, but not strongly so; and I try to keep my opinions about the object topic to the agree/disagree voting.
I don’t know how representative I am of the Lesswrong population in that regard, but I at least think most people who downvote a comment would prefer for it to stay undeleted; if only to make past discussions legilible.
FYI, I downvoted for the comment deletion. (I have no idea what your comments said, because I only saw them after the edit.) I object to deleting comments after you’ve posted them and had them replied to—I consider it to be disruptive and non-cooperative, basically a defection against the other forum participants. (With exceptions for, like, “whoops I accidentally said some information that I didn’t mean to make public”, or whatever. But even then a targeted info-removing edit is the ideal way.)
Ditto. Gears, I didn’t downvote your comments until you deleted them. It’s now hard to see why I wrote what I did. I think that’s bad form.
That said, I read you (Gears) as being overwhelmed here. I’m guessing you wanted to delete your comments because you’re both hurting and feeling unseen/unsupported. Pulling out, including deleting your comments, totally makes sense to me in that context I’m imagining you in.
In the future, if you have to do that, I think it would be kinder to make some kind of note about that in the deleted comment.
Even better would be to use
strikethroughwith a comment saying something like “This is beyond my capacity to keep engaging in, I’ll leave this here so others can understand the exchange, but I’m checking out and ask not to be pulled in or expected to reply.”But I also recognize this is an intense and painful topic for you. I understand if all of those options are out of emotional range for you.
But in case they’re not out of range in the future, that’d at least have avoided my and Said’s downvotes!
[deleted due to going below zero, in order to disengage myself from a conversation that was pushing me into a bad mental state. Please do not reply further to my comments here; I wish lesswrong had “mute replies”. I am now rate limited to one post per day because of mass downvoting on four comments.]
Edit: in this comment I said deleting a comment isn’t defecting if it’s after a mass downvote, what I meant was that it’s legitimate response to being downvoted unjustly, when my comment was expressing a reasonable opinion.
When I downvote a comment it is basically never because I want the author to delete that comment. I rarely downvote comments already bellow 0, but even when I do it is not because I wish the comment was deleted. Instead, it mostly means that I dislike the way in which that comment was written and thought out; that I don’t want people to have that style / approach when commenting. This correlates with me disagreeing with the position, but not strongly so; and I try to keep my opinions about the object topic to the agree/disagree voting.
I don’t know how representative I am of the Lesswrong population in that regard, but I at least think most people who downvote a comment would prefer for it to stay undeleted; if only to make past discussions legilible.
Uh… that’s not how “defection” works.