I have no clue whether any of my previous comments on your posts will qualify me for perma-ban, but if so, please do so now, to save the trouble of future annoyance since I have no intention of changing anything. I am generally respectful, but I don’t expect to fully understand these rules, let alone follow them.
I have no authority over this, but I’d hope the mods choose not to frontpage anything that has a particularly odd and restrictive comment policy, or a surprisingly-large ban list.
I’d hope the mods choose not to frontpage anything that has a particularly odd and restrictive comment policy
I think it’s better to annoy commenters than to annoy post authors, so actually allowing serious Reign of Terror is better than meaningfully discouraging it. That’s the whole point of Reign of Terror, and as the name suggests it shouldn’t be guaranteed to be comfortable for its subjects.
One problem with how it’s currently used is authors placing Reign of Terror policy for their own comfort in a motte/bailey way, without any actual harsh moderation activity, inflating the category into the territory of expected comfort for the commenters. There should be weak incentive for authors to not do this if they don’t actually care.
For a lot of posts, the value is pretty evenly distributed among the post and the comments. For frontpage-worthy ones, it’s probably weighted more to posts, granted. I fully agree that “reign of terror” is not sufficient reason to keep something off frontpage.
I was reacting more to the very detailed rules that don’t (to me) match my intuitions of good commenting on LW, and the declaration of perma-bans with fairly small provocation. A lot will depend on implementation—how many comments lc allows, and how many commenters get banned.
Mostly, I really hope LW doesn’t become a publishing medium rather than a discussion space.
I was reacting more to the very detailed rules that don’t (to me) match my intuitions of good commenting on LW, and the declaration of perma-bans with fairly small provocation. A lot will depend on implementation—how many comments lc allows, and how many commenters get banned.
There’s practically no reason on a rationality forum for you to assert your identity or personal status over another commenter. I agree the rules I’ve given are very detailed. I don’t agree that any of the vast majority of valuable comments on LessWrong are somehow bannable by my standard.
The reason I’m stringent about doing this, is because the status asserting comments literally ruin it for everybody else, even when the majority of everybody else is not interested in such competitions. They make people like me, who are jealous and insecure, review everything they’ve ever written in the light that they might be judged. I don’t come here because I want to engage in yet another status tournament. I come here because I want to become a better thinker and learn new and interesting things about the world. I also come here because I like being able to presume that most of the other commenters are using the forum like I am. In this sense it’s worth it to me if this policy prevents one person from trying to social climb even if I have to prevent four other comments that wouldn’t otherwise be a problem.
As I said, obviously this is not a retroactively applying policy, I have not followed it until now, and I will not ban anybody for commenting differently on my posts. I’m not going to ban you pre-emptively or judge you harshly for not following all of my ridiculously complicated rules. Feel free to continue commenting on my posts as you please and just let me eventually ban you; that’s honestly fine by me and you should not feel bad about it.
I personally hope they would not refuse to frontpage my posts from now on for having a restrictive comment policy when it’s not obviously censoring criticism of the post itself, but I have already forfeited arbitrarily large amounts of exposure and the mods can do what they wish.
I have no clue whether any of my previous comments on your posts will qualify me for perma-ban, but if so, please do so now, to save the trouble of future annoyance since I have no intention of changing anything. I am generally respectful, but I don’t expect to fully understand these rules, let alone follow them.
I have no authority over this, but I’d hope the mods choose not to frontpage anything that has a particularly odd and restrictive comment policy, or a surprisingly-large ban list.
I think it’s better to annoy commenters than to annoy post authors, so actually allowing serious Reign of Terror is better than meaningfully discouraging it. That’s the whole point of Reign of Terror, and as the name suggests it shouldn’t be guaranteed to be comfortable for its subjects.
One problem with how it’s currently used is authors placing Reign of Terror policy for their own comfort in a motte/bailey way, without any actual harsh moderation activity, inflating the category into the territory of expected comfort for the commenters. There should be weak incentive for authors to not do this if they don’t actually care.
For a lot of posts, the value is pretty evenly distributed among the post and the comments. For frontpage-worthy ones, it’s probably weighted more to posts, granted. I fully agree that “reign of terror” is not sufficient reason to keep something off frontpage.
I was reacting more to the very detailed rules that don’t (to me) match my intuitions of good commenting on LW, and the declaration of perma-bans with fairly small provocation. A lot will depend on implementation—how many comments lc allows, and how many commenters get banned.
Mostly, I really hope LW doesn’t become a publishing medium rather than a discussion space.
There’s practically no reason on a rationality forum for you to assert your identity or personal status over another commenter. I agree the rules I’ve given are very detailed. I don’t agree that any of the vast majority of valuable comments on LessWrong are somehow bannable by my standard.
The reason I’m stringent about doing this, is because the status asserting comments literally ruin it for everybody else, even when the majority of everybody else is not interested in such competitions. They make people like me, who are jealous and insecure, review everything they’ve ever written in the light that they might be judged. I don’t come here because I want to engage in yet another status tournament. I come here because I want to become a better thinker and learn new and interesting things about the world. I also come here because I like being able to presume that most of the other commenters are using the forum like I am. In this sense it’s worth it to me if this policy prevents one person from trying to social climb even if I have to prevent four other comments that wouldn’t otherwise be a problem.
As I said, obviously this is not a retroactively applying policy, I have not followed it until now, and I will not ban anybody for commenting differently on my posts. I’m not going to ban you pre-emptively or judge you harshly for not following all of my ridiculously complicated rules. Feel free to continue commenting on my posts as you please and just let me eventually ban you; that’s honestly fine by me and you should not feel bad about it.
I personally hope they would not refuse to frontpage my posts from now on for having a restrictive comment policy when it’s not obviously censoring criticism of the post itself, but I have already forfeited arbitrarily large amounts of exposure and the mods can do what they wish.