"Hide comments in downvoted threads" is now active

I have no particular antipathy toward either Wei Dai or wedrifid, nor did I allow myself to develop a particular attachment to either "side" in that particular controversy, given that the appearance of "sides" at all didn't strike me as particularly productive.

Not productive in the slightest. In fact I would happily downvote my own comment (despite reflectively endorsing it) just to hide the entire pointless load of tripe.

No less than eight levels above

I generally don't read deeply nested comments (except when I load the Recent Comments page, which shows me everything without knowing how deep it is). I find they're rarely worth it, especially when it's just two people going hammer and tongs at each other. Even if one of the two people is me.

On reflection, I think I got a bit frustrated towards the end of my discussion with wedrifid, and lost some of my "cool", but overall I would say that the discussion has been productive at least for me, given the inherent difficulties in human communications (and the (still mysterious-to-me) refusal on wedrifid's part to answer many of my questions). While the information I got wasn't what I set out to obtain at the start, nevertheless what I got is useful. For example I've learned that there are a number of forum behaviors that he considers undesirable and is willing to "punish" (which he apparently means in a somewhat technical sense):

• rhetorical questions aimed at convincing the audience (and not hedging/indicating uncertainty)
• inferring ("mind-reading") negative motives or toxic beliefs in others and then stating them publicly in order to shame
• quoting others out of context in order to making them look bad (this one was actually learned previously, but I'm including it here for completeness sake)

To be clear, naturally I don't disagree that these behaviors are bad but think wedrifid tends err in the direction of judging too many people guilty. Regardless, at least in the future I can be more careful about my uses of rhetorical questions, inference of motives and beliefs, and quoting (e.g., do not use them unless I'm extremely confident that their actual and intended effects won't be misunderstood) and hope to avoid some of the "punishments" that way.

It may be that in retrospect the amount of useful information exchanged seems really small compared to the amount of text exchanged. I think in part that's due to hindsight bias and illusion of transparency that makes us think communication is easier than it really is, but almost certainly there are also things we could have done better, that would have made the exchange go more smoothly and efficiently. If anyone has any suggestions in that regard, I think (at least speaking for myself) they would be very much welcomed.

This could be fixed by making the hiding apply only to comments at most, say, three levels down from a downvoted comment.

Perhaps a way to make this work would be to automatically unhide downstream comments whose upvotes are greater than the sum of the downvotes of all its negative-karma parents? In that way, a good (ie. high-karma) discussion can't be killed by a low-karma parent thread so easily.

you can "swim up" the chain of comment parents until you find one that is at -3, and by downvoting that cause the entire downthread discussion to be effectively censored.

That only works when you have large discussions under downvoted comments, which should become much less common now.

Maybe we need a "move to open discussion thread" voting button in addition to the karma buttons. Above a certain threshold off-topic but useful discussions could thereby be moved and orphaned from an original <-4 parent, perhaps leaving a link to the new thread or more sensibly someone else could just link to the new thread in another comment if there's any lingering topicalness. This would further discourage trolls because there would no longer be any correlation between their downvoted comment and a good discussion.

The threshold ought to be a user preference.

If so, then definitely of the 'opt-out' kind with the current behavior as the default. Making the (at least reasonably likely to be) trashy conversations invisible to new users is one of the most important goals of the feature.

It's pretty bad. I can't read even some of my own comments when logged in without clicking.

It also ignores the value.

I disagree somewhat- hiding new messages from the inbox is a bad idea. People should be able to know when new messages have been made to them. The primary advantage that would occur here is that people who browse using Recent Comments won't see them. This doesn't accomplish anything.

I've submitted a bug report about that.

Performed the following experiment:

Went to this comment, which has (right now) a score of -9 and a child with a score of +12 and a grandchild with a score of +4.

Recorded my karma score (9686).

Attempted to reply to the downvoted comment; got the warning. Didn't post a reply.

Attempted to reply to the upvoted child; got the warning (which, incidentally, warns about replying to downvoted comments, which might be confusing). Didn't post a reply.

Also performed the following experiment:

Went to this post, which has (right now) a score of -9 and some upvoted comments.

Recorded my karma score (9687).

Attempted to reply to the post, no warning.

Submitted this comment

Checked my karma score (9686). I assume the -1 is just because someone downvoted something in the minute or so it took me to do that.

(Incidentally, I would still love a feature where I could review recent upvotes and downvotes applied to me... to the extent that karma is intended as feedback for the poster, it helps to have some way of associating that feedback with the actual thing being evaluated. Knowing that I said something at some time that someone wants less of on LW doesn't really help me much.)

• unnecessary link and opinion retracted -

There is a moderation mechanism designed to do X when users do Y. If this mechanism is good, we should keep it. If this mechanism is bad, we should remove or modify it. But we should not think about this mechanism while voting. That's gaming the mechanism.

A mechanism requiring that it should not be thought about is a significant flaw. Stable systems rely on being robust with respect to people trying to achieve desired goals via them, at least to the degree that is practical. It so happens that I don't think the 'gaming' potential of this mechanism is actually especially significant. People downvoting a comments because "they want to see less of this entire thread" is not too much of a corruption away from "they want to see less of this". People do exactly this already, without this mechanism. In fact, they go through and systematically downvote every comment in a thread. Downvoting just the one is a net reduction in 'gaming', if that label applies at all.

But we should not think about this mechanism while voting. That's gaming the mechanism.

And playing to win is wrong!

There is nothing more to think about while voting.

There wasn't until karma became meaningful. Now karma has meaning.

That's all. There is nothing more to think about while voting. If you think there should be more things to consider while voting, please explain what and why.

• "This comment deserves to be at +5, not +40. The voting is totally out of proportion and I would prefer it were encouraged to a +39 degree than a +40 degree."
• "The parent is at +8 while this comment is at +1. It is an undesirable thing for there to be such a difference in karma between these two comments because the reply is at least as good as its parent. I am going to upvote the reply."

I certainly support the heuristic: Upvote = "LessWrong discussions should have more of this." In fact, I've been advocating it for long enough that when I first advocating that interpretation it provoked controversy in as much as some considered it too cynical compared to more pure ideals along the lines of votes being obliged to mean "the point in this comment is rationally coherent". That said, it isn't quite the only consideration that it is reasonable to take in to account and I apply both of the heuristics mentioned above from time to time.

I asked Eliezer:

do you expect people to change their voting behavior to not downvote to -4 except for trolling

And he answered:

And yes, I'd wistfully hope for some amount of community norm-change around, "If it's worth replying to, clearly it can't be so bad that I ought to vote it down to -4"

So apparently he does want people to be aware of the mechanism while voting.

It looks to me like Eridu sincerely holds positions that you would be expected to find particularly objectionable or even have trouble believing someone could hold in part due to a huge inferential distance between what the world must look like (including perceptual valences) to the two of you. He's not presenting new ideas. Some People have been taking seriously those ideas for a long time. Is anyone who is a sincere radical feminist that bring their normal (imprecise and [even more]politicky) ways of speaking to less wrong going to be labelled a troll? If so your heuristic is broken because that's a very common way for people to express themselves.

Also trolling almost always means provocation for a negative reaction. provocation for attention is a sad and pitiable state of affairs more commonly associated with the words attention-seeking whereas trolling usually means looking to upset people for the sake of it which is a much more hostile kind of thing.

Thanks -- I was curious to look into the details of that memetic attack.

Why do we want to encourage spreading discussions around? If it's a good conversation then it makes more sense in context and people should just keep it together, and if it's crappy you're just crapping up more of the forum. We don't encourage good replies to good posts to also post elsewhere.