Comment 59816

By bob lee (anonymous) | Posted February 15, 2011 at 18:36:11 in reply to Comment 59814

it's not even close to perfect. You are right that it serves one function of graying out trollery. But I think that function operates as a sideshow to that other *more troubling* function which is basically censorship of a warm kind, where me and my pals agree that we don't really like that guy telling us things that we don't really want to hear. And in my opinion the damage done by censorship wildly overshadows the damage done by vicious comments.

Here's another way to look at it. Given that your stated purpose for comment voting is to gray out trolls and keep commentary on a sophisticated level, and your default setting is 5 for graying out to become total (right?) Then almost no one should get more than 5 downvotes, because that would be the threshold for them to disappear. A minus 30 then doesn't mean your system is working effectively, it indicates that 25 registered users have set their default setting to be that they see all the troll comments. That is they do exactly the opposite of what you intend. And when just about the highest possible score is in the 30s, that means almost nobody is following your scheme. Unless a number of registered users are out there neither downvoting or upvoting but taking advantage of your default setting, which I seriously doubt.

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