User bans can be made transparent via the sort of centralized moderation log I described in my other comment. (For users banned by individual users, from their own personal blogs, there should probably also be a specific list, on the user page of the one who did the banning, of everyone they’ve banned from their posts.)
A central log would indeed allow anyone to see who was banned and when. My concern is more that such a solution would be practically ineffective. I think that most people reading an article aren’t likely to navigate to the central log and search the ban list to see how many people have been banned by said articles author. I’d like to see a system for flagging up bans which is both transparent and easy to access, ideally so anyone reading the page/discussion will notice if banning is taking place and to what extent. Sadly, I haven’t been able to think of a good solution which does that.
Yeah, I agree it doesn’t create the ideal level of transparency. In my mind, a moderation log is more similar to an accounting solution than an educational solution, where the purpose of accounting is not something that is constantly broadcasted to the whole system, but is instead used to backtrack if something has gone wrong, or if people are suspicious that there is some underlying systematic problem going on. Which might get you a lot of the value that you want, for significantly lower UI-complexity cost.
I believe it was Eliezer who (perhaps somewhere in the Sequences) enjoined us to consider a problem for at least five minutes, by the clock, before judging it to be unsolvable—and I have found that this applies in full measure in UX design.
Consider the following potential solutions (understanding them to be the products of a brainstorm only, not a full and rigorous design cycle):
A button (or other UI element, etc.) on every post, along the lines of “view history of moderation actions which apply to this post”.
A flag, attached to posts where moderation has occurred; which, when clicked, would take you to the central moderation log (or the user-specific one), and highlight all entries that apply to the referring post.
The same as #2, but with the flag coming in two “flavors”—one for “the OP has taken moderation actions”, and one for “the LW2 admin team has taken moderation actions”.
This is what I was able to come up with in five minutes of considering the problem. These solutions both seem to me to be quite unobtrusive, and yet at the same time, “transparent and easy to access”, as per your criteria. I also do not see any fundamental design or implementation difficulties that attach to them.
No doubt other approaches are possible; but at the very least, the problem seems eminently solvable, with a bit of effort.
User bans can be made transparent via the sort of centralized moderation log I described in my other comment. (For users banned by individual users, from their own personal blogs, there should probably also be a specific list, on the user page of the one who did the banning, of everyone they’ve banned from their posts.)
A central log would indeed allow anyone to see who was banned and when. My concern is more that such a solution would be practically ineffective. I think that most people reading an article aren’t likely to navigate to the central log and search the ban list to see how many people have been banned by said articles author. I’d like to see a system for flagging up bans which is both transparent and easy to access, ideally so anyone reading the page/discussion will notice if banning is taking place and to what extent. Sadly, I haven’t been able to think of a good solution which does that.
Yeah, I agree it doesn’t create the ideal level of transparency. In my mind, a moderation log is more similar to an accounting solution than an educational solution, where the purpose of accounting is not something that is constantly broadcasted to the whole system, but is instead used to backtrack if something has gone wrong, or if people are suspicious that there is some underlying systematic problem going on. Which might get you a lot of the value that you want, for significantly lower UI-complexity cost.
I believe it was Eliezer who (perhaps somewhere in the Sequences) enjoined us to consider a problem for at least five minutes, by the clock, before judging it to be unsolvable—and I have found that this applies in full measure in UX design.
Consider the following potential solutions (understanding them to be the products of a brainstorm only, not a full and rigorous design cycle):
A button (or other UI element, etc.) on every post, along the lines of “view history of moderation actions which apply to this post”.
A flag, attached to posts where moderation has occurred; which, when clicked, would take you to the central moderation log (or the user-specific one), and highlight all entries that apply to the referring post.
The same as #2, but with the flag coming in two “flavors”—one for “the OP has taken moderation actions”, and one for “the LW2 admin team has taken moderation actions”.
This is what I was able to come up with in five minutes of considering the problem. These solutions both seem to me to be quite unobtrusive, and yet at the same time, “transparent and easy to access”, as per your criteria. I also do not see any fundamental design or implementation difficulties that attach to them.
No doubt other approaches are possible; but at the very least, the problem seems eminently solvable, with a bit of effort.