Comments on: Suggest A Comments Policy

By: Michael Dickens

Michael Dickens — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 21:25:56 +0000

As someone whose blog follows (1), I have successfully caught a number of spammy comments that WordPress did not catch. It also hasn’t been too much work, although my blog gets a lot less traffic than yours.

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By: St. Rev

St. Rev — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 00:03:50 +0000

Then a third party creates a mod that assigns votes using an alternate, Scott-independent currency called Twitcoin. Hilarity ensues.

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By: Ian Pollock

Ian Pollock — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 23:42:20 +0000

A liquidity trap quickly results, as everybody wants to save their votes for downvoting NRs or feminists, or for their own Great Troll That Was Totally Worth It, so everybody hoards and nobody votes at all until Scott injects liquidity into the system. But really it’s people’s *expectations* of their future voting that are driving the problem, forcing Scott to precommit to a central-bank policy of releasing N votes per month until full health is restored to the voting economy. Sooner or later he overshoots and it turns into the voting equivalent of Zimbabwe – mediocre puns gets voted to +1,000,000,000. Et cetera.

Somebody put this into PredictionBook pls.

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By: Apprentice

Apprentice — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 12:07:31 +0000

Ban all personal attacks – except from Multiheaded. His are so well crafted that it would be a shame to lose them.

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By: suntzuanime

suntzuanime — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 23:34:38 +0000

It’s not as easy as you say. “Bad comments” are hard to distinguish, both for the punisher and the commentor, so you have people refraining from making good comments out of a possibly justified fear of being punished for them. I’ve been banned often enough to recognize that a free hand when banning is not an unalloyed good.

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By: St. Rev

St. Rev — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 21:05:42 +0000

One last idea: upvote/downvote economy. Votes are currency and rarely handed out. Downvoting burns a vote, upvoting transfers one to the recipient. Only Scott can add new votes to the system.

I can roll a dozen minor variations on the idea but that’s the essence.

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By: abramdemski

abramdemski — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 20:59:23 +0000

Apparently the term for the problem is “the filter bubble”. http://dontbubble.us/

There could be several ways to try and address the information-bias problem. My brother likes to talk about randomization for this; IE think of randomized google results, facebook feed… bias toward your preferences but showing you things which other people (not in your cluster) like as well.

While randomness is only appropriate in some contexts, the idea of showing the most popular stuff from other bubbles may be promising. There is also the RbutR model: go out of your way to link refutations to statements. (Imagine if every link or photo on facebook which had a corresponding snopes article, automatically linked to it via a little snopes symbol in the corner. Wouldn’t that be nice?)

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By: abramdemski

abramdemski — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 20:44:37 +0000

Current feeling: this is the future of the internet; in <10 years it'll be standard; let's play with it.

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By: nyan sandwich

nyan sandwich — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 19:41:14 +0000

Why is everyone so allergic to Law? I mean, I know the answer, but it’s stupid. The problem of public order is SOLVED, and has been for about 5000 years. All we have to do is choose to apply the solution.

If you are running a city, you don’t just let the people riot and murder and then try to design an automated cleanup crew and medical system that can limit the damage and clean up afterwards, you *reliably punish people for rioting* so that when people are choosing whether to riot, they choose not to riot.

Similar for comments sections. You don’t just let the rabble in to spew their uncivil internet sludge all over the place and then design an algorithm that will somehow salvage a high-quality comments section from that. It’s too hard. Instead, you *reliably punish bad comments*, so that when people are choosing tone and content, they choose to put in the extra effort to make it good.

Everything about the nature of comments sections makes them easier to govern. There is no politics or red tape to navigate, surveillance is total so there is no ambiguity about who did what, and the admin has the ring of Fnarg. That comments sections deteriorate even in the face of this is mind-boggling.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 18:59:14 +0000

Scott,

The most important thing is that you start doing something, in particular, warning people that their behavior is unacceptable. Technical details of how to actually carry out bannings are much less important. Warnings may well be all you need, though you should definitely figure out how to ban within the default setup. It sounds like the main barrier is that you are afraid of using your judgement and that people will whine that you are being unfair. But in the very few examples where you have given warnings about specific actions, people simply ignored them and whined that you were applying a double standard. So there is simply no benefit to written objective standards.

You also sound worried about having a double standard between new threads and old ones that you don’t read. One option is simply to accept a double standard! That’s probably better than the status quo. Another is to close them. Maybe it would be better to have a method for people to flag comments for attention, but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Try incremental changes. Figure out what you can do with moderation in the current set up before worrying about more complicated ones.

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