Railing against trends is less a commentary against the premise of the site, and more a commentary against the emergent whims of groupthink. Points systems amp

Railing against trends is less a commentary against the premise of the site, and more a commentary against the emergent whims of groupthink. Points systems amplify the perception of groupthink, and getting karma stomped into a ban happens a lot. Getting banned for a greyed out comment is kind of lame, and I think a certain sort of darwinism, of letting vitriolic people express their contempt has utility. In other words, more people should develop a thick skin, and fewer people should be silenced. In theory, that sounds good, but obviously it can also go wrong, to let people bloviate too much. I think the solution is to permit the full stream but classify and sort the responses, but in most cases, NLP just isn’t good enough to automate grouped selections of comments, so we get stuck with a one dimensional mechanical turk voting rank. Yay versus boo! I don’t enjoy the idea of AI submerging buried comments deepet, but trusting people to vote according to quality of discussion is a dubious gambit, and you really only get an edge detection doppler return revealing the joints of political fault lines, which gets old when holy wars guide many an opinion.