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I keep showdead on all the time, because sometimes I see insightful, thoughtful answers that are dead for no reason intrinsic to the comment. Then I can vouch

I keep showdead on all the time, because sometimes I see insightful, thoughtful answers that are dead for no reason intrinsic to the comment. Then I can vouch for them, and I hope they become visible to others — though the workings of that system are opaque to me. I get annoyed reading the same smarmy-sounding "Please don't post unsubstantive comments" replies from dang all the time — but it's what makes this site work, when so many others don't.

dahart 7y ago
Those two things are related. The warning messages are what happens before the account gets shadow-banned. Sometimes you can walk back in a dead commenter’s history to see what caused the problem and it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s not apparent because it can happen for multiple reasons. Personally, I’d rather have the constant out-of-bounds reminders than not. I’ve never seen one of those warning messages on a comment that didn’t deserve it, I’ll take the ‘please play nice’ requests all day if it quells ugly flame bait, and that’s exactly what it seems to do. He’s giving people both notification that it’s out of bounds and advance warning that there could be consequences. Much worse is out there and easy to find. Do you have examples that are much better, on a comparably sized forum?
- JasonFruit 7y ago
  Like I said, it's why this site works and others don't. I'm not aware of a better solution. Facetiously, I suppose you could take the approach of the app 'Yo': constrain the possible messages to exclude anything potentially offensive.
  - dahart 7y ago
    I used to work for Disney and we were tasked with constraining the possible messages to exclude potentially offensive material. It does keep out the obvious no-effort messages with swear words, and it does tend to reduce negative messages. But it was interesting and sometimes fun to see the creative ways people would write bad words or sexually suggestive materials or tell each other off. It’s not possible to stop all offensive content with constraints or technology. Not yet anyway.
knolax 7y ago
>I get annoyed reading the same smarmy-sounding "Please don't post unsubstantive comments" replies from dang all the time — but it's what makes this site work, when so many others don't. The thing is I haven't seen one of those in a long time. Now you can have entire threads where the only comments are "lol" or something like that.

dahart 7y ago

Those two things are related. The warning messages are what happens before the account gets shadow-banned. Sometimes you can walk back in a dead commenter’s history to see what caused the problem and it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s not apparent because it can happen for multiple reasons. Personally, I’d rather have the constant out-of-bounds reminders than not. I’ve never seen one of those warning messages on a comment that didn’t deserve it, I’ll take the ‘please play nice’ requests all day if it quells ugly flame bait, and that’s exactly what it seems to do. He’s giving people both notification that it’s out of bounds and advance warning that there could be consequences. Much worse is out there and easy to find. Do you have examples that are much better, on a comparably sized forum?

JasonFruit 7y ago
Like I said, it's why this site works and others don't. I'm not aware of a better solution. Facetiously, I suppose you could take the approach of the app 'Yo': constrain the possible messages to exclude anything potentially offensive.
- dahart 7y ago
  I used to work for Disney and we were tasked with constraining the possible messages to exclude potentially offensive material. It does keep out the obvious no-effort messages with swear words, and it does tend to reduce negative messages. But it was interesting and sometimes fun to see the creative ways people would write bad words or sexually suggestive materials or tell each other off. It’s not possible to stop all offensive content with constraints or technology. Not yet anyway.

knolax 7y ago

>I get annoyed reading the same smarmy-sounding "Please don't post unsubstantive comments" replies from dang all the time — but it's what makes this site work, when so many others don't. The thing is I haven't seen one of those in a long time. Now you can have entire threads where the only comments are "lol" or something like that.