3 Comments a day?

[mailanay]

I read Paul Graham's "How To Disagree" (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html) and a blog "One a Day" (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/one-a-day.html).

Would creating a scarcity of number of comments that can be posted a day (say 3 comments a day) make people think twice before commenting and probably reduce DH0 - DH3 type of responses?

[brentr]

Creating a comment limit would, theoretically, reduce the DH0-DH3 responses. Let's examine this.

Let us assume that X gets n units of utility for every point of karma the community awards.

Let us further assume that the community only awards points of karma for insightful posts/comments. This appears to be a safe assumption.

If X knew that comments/posts were scarce, which under your proposal they would be, then X will attempt to maximize the karma earned from each comment/post by maximizing the insightful nature of each comment/post.

In a way, karma whoring would actually curtail garbage comments/posts, if comments/posts were a scarce resource.

[edw519 → brentr]

"then X will attempt to maximize the karma earned from each comment/post by maximizing the insightful nature of each comment/post"

I think you may be overlooking one minor little detail that took me a long time to learn: We have little control of how others will judge our comments.

I have made many comments when I thought, "I nailed it!" and then no one voted or replied at all. Even worse, sometimes downmodded without replies. Other times, I made a smarta$$ remark and it got lots of upvotes. I have a suspicision that the same comment may "perform" very differently depending who else is on-line that day. I finally realized that I should just try to be myself and let the chips fall where they may.

I think the best way to "police" the site is not by limiting anyone, but by prudently using the up and down arrows.

[kf → edw519]

Comments tend to do best by saying something clearly correct very early in the existence of a big thread. It's easy to get +5 on Slashdot in the same way.