Moderation of apparent trolling
A brief line from this comment indicates that the author of the cryonics-critical comment quoted here was perhaps not the one that deleted it.
You know what—I am rather glad my comment was deleted on less wrong—good reason for people not to post on there.
Was it deleted by a moderator?
Honestly, the decisive downvoting seemed to do the trick of hiding it from casual readers who don’t want to see the long annoying rants. I don’t think it was casting any doubt on the credibility of cryonics.
While it sounds like the author regrets posting it, I would think they should be allowed to delete it themselves.
Edit: Originally titled “Cryonics critical comment deleted?”
As a mod, I can see banned comments (though not deleted ones). The user’s comments visible to me on the page (there are three) are all heavily downvoted, all banned, and all unadulterated crap. Example:
I’ll quote the other two if people want the content (and unban them if people feel very strongly that I ought), but I really think there is no loss here—this is somewhere between spam, personal abuse, and trolling.
Those are visible to everybody. (As was recently discovered, mod-banned comments continue to be visible on the poster’s userpage. That should probably be considered a bug, but for the moment, it’s a feature.)
Never assume bad intent when insanity will suffice. :-)
Given that the user in question was trolling and had all comments reduced to very negative values, what most likely happened is that the user was banned. Sometimes when users are banned the most insulting or trolliish comments are deleted when the user is banned. Note also that all the comments are available here. Considering the level of insulting vitriol in the comments, outright deletion seems like a completely reasonable response. I don’t think comments that say things like:
is at all helping the signal to noise ratio.
For what it is worth, calm, careful negative comments about cryonics are generally accepted. See for example my comment in this thread.
Deletion of comments by richiekgb is simply letting the eldest Billy Goat Gruff do his job.
Richie may be a troll, but there are those who seem to take him seriously and applaud his efforts. He doesn’t seem to be a deliberate troll, just an over-emotional jerk who is genuinely upset about cryonics. I realize we need to have a filter in place to keep the SNR good, but I thought the karma system was probably sufficient in this case. I could be wrong though; I don’t have any experience with moderating a forum personally.
If some fan of Jack Chick came here preaching about how we needed to accept Jesus Christ as our personal lord and savior would you care about the fact that the person was sincere and that millions of people in the United States think he is correct? Sincerity cannot be a test of whether content is worth keeping. Nor can the presence of people who happen to agree be a useful test. (Incidentally can someone explain why Richie seems to see some sort of connection between cryonics and modern day satanism? I don’t follow this train of thought...)
This still doesn’t answer the question: why isn’t down voting good enough? I’d rather rely mostly on community moderation rather than a few specialized moderators.
As a side note, perhaps users with sufficiently negative karma should have their comments hidden by default?
The main issue isn’t that downvoting isn’t good enough but that we don’t want to terribly damage the signal to noise ratio. Thus, we don’t want massive amounts of spam or trolling in threads, even if it has been downvoted. But this argument is fairly weak. If users could be banned without having comments deleted that would solve the primary problem.
There’s a prominent cryonics advocate and organizer in the UK who has recently begun his own stabilization organization. He also happens to be a member of the Church of Satan and the Temple of Vampire (the latter of which is apparently a transhumanist group with some kind of vampire pretensions).
I am a lot less interested in David Styles’ pseudo-religious hobbies than I am in the accusation that EUCrio does not have the staffing resources and response capabilities it claims to have. Has there been a rebuttal to that?
There’s been an attempted rebuttal at least. That thread was active as a couple of days ago.
Given that I have David Styles’s phone number on a card in my wallet with emergency instructions above it, I’d love a link—cheers!
It’s in the same SA thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/343/suspended_animation_inc_accused_of_incompetence/2yzr?c=1 Melanie disputes it
Hmm, can’t find very much specific discussion of David Styles or EUCRio in there.
The fact that Melody Maxim takes Richie seriously changes my opinion of her a lot more than it does of him.
Richie is not a troll, he’s been perfectly nice in person, completely sincere and identifies as a futurist. However he really doesn’t seem to have any problem with acting like a total jerk online.
A troll really is about online acts. In person behavior isn’t actually relevant. I would guess that most rolls are perfectly reasonable people in person. (While I do think it is possible to be an accidental troll, by spawning huge acrimonious and pointless threads without intending, but the disruption is still as much of a problem when it happens.)
“Troll” implies malign motives. Someone can be a massive dick with complete sincerity.
But we don’t actually care about motivation, we care about stupidity.
Personally I suspect leaving the comments of the poster in question visible, buried in a slag heap at −12, is just fine. You have to want to look, and examples of blithering stupidity are often useful as teachable examples.
Actually, I think it would work if the tag that indicates number of replies to a downvoted-to-oblivion post also had the average karma for the thread. This would give a fast way to judge whether the thread would be worth reading.
I didn’t ban them, and whichever mod did, I support them fully. See Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.
We need the following features on LW:
1) Banned comments no longer appear on user pages. Otherwise spammers have a motive to spam in order to steal pagerank.
2) When a comment is banned or goes to say −4 or below, but not when that comment is deleted, subcomments of it no longer appear in the Recent Comments feed. This will help ensure that stupid discussions ACTUALLY GET PRUNED rather than going on forever.
3) Automatic warning when a user posts a comment falling under 2.
4) Automatic warning when a user tries to delete a comment that already has subcomments, which people seem to do by accident a lot.
I’m not sure 1) is a good idea. As Paul Graham says here.
3 and 4 seem reasonable. 1 seems not so. Spam is dealt with pretty well, userpages have very low Google rankings, and external links already have nofollow tags so they don’t add to page rank.
2 seems also problematic because there are conversation threads that start with highly downvoted comments but themselves contain useful remarks.
Agreed; the automatic warnings (as in (3)) should be enough to remind people that they might be posting in a stupid thread. (Maybe direct replies to a comment below −4 shouldn’t appear in the Recent Comments feed, and perhaps direct replies to anything else posted by the same user within the same thread?)
I support (1), though. It doesn’t seem unreasonable (let alone tyrannical) to allow moderators to delete comments and have them be actually deleted, or actually not-publicly-viewable at least; pretty much all forum software allows that.
The flipside is that the automatic warnings reduces the problems with 2. Once the warning occurs, the discussion can simply be moved to, well, the discussion area. (I’m not begging for new LW functionality, I just mean that when someone sees that waring, they can instead just start something in the discussion area and maybe leave a link in the thread to the new discussion)
I like the first half of that, but not the second. It is possible to say something stupid and something worthwhile in the same thread, and it would be unneccessarily confusing to have replies to non-downvoted comments not showing up.
That in itself is problematic—if they were barred from Recent Comments, maybe they’d be moved out from under downvoted comments.
By “moved”, do you mean cut’n’paste, or actual moving?
I mean that people might continue the conversation elsewhere—there’s no mechanism for users to move comments.
I agree with your point about 2. Perhaps subthreads with a comment average above a rather moderate limit should stay in recent comments.
Intuitively, I’d go with 1.5.
I wonder what the average karma for comments is in the past year or so. Now I wonder what the monthly average is—that might be a way of getting a sketchy view of cultural changes in LW, though it wouldn’t tell you whether it’s a change in the quality of comments or the culture of voting.
Or the number of voters. People seem in general to be more likely to vote up than to vote down. If people act roughly like a biased coin then we should expect the average karma to go up as the number of new users increases. Although there are other complicating factors such as the fact that comments can accumulate karma over time. Does the system keep track of when a comment was upvoted or just that someone has been upvoted?
This is the behavior we want to avoid.
It might help to ask why we want to avoid this. The most obvious reason is that the comments then become not visible to someone scanning the entire thread. If that’s the concern, then that’s a minor issue. Moreover, if that is the cause, then the situation will only become worse if people also can’t see them in the recent comments thread.
Presumably, in the ideal universe, under most circumstances, people will start a new thread to discuss a relevant idea in a highly downvoted prior subthread. But a thread has turned into an actually productive entity, I don’t see how that isn’t a good thing.
What am I missing?
If the goal of collapsing downvoted comments is to make it easier for people to find valuable conversations without wasting their time reading downvoted comments, then having valuable conversations downstream of downvoted comments (such that, in order to read the valuable conversation, you also have to read the downvoted comment) subverts that goal.
You’re right, of course, that hiding those comments doesn’t guarantee that valuable conversations won’t wind up downstream of them. But I’d expect it to lower the odds
Karma isn’t synchronous, so the discussion can take place before the parent is downvoted. For example, this thread contains a discussion that probably mostly occurred before Eliezer’s comment was voted down to −4… making this very thread an example of the reason why this shouldn’t be done.
(Among other things, it means you can make an entire thread of conversation vanish by targeting a parent with a few downvotes, which really over-powers downvoters.)
If people are doing this lots, it’s not clear how pruning productive discussion is a good thing other than from something like an urge for tidiness. I see no reason to assume it will spring up elsewhere.
(shrug) If encouraging people to read downvoted-to-oblivion comments is a minus, then there’s a non-tidy benefit. Clearly, people differ in terms of how much they believe it is.
As for the same discussion springing up elsewhere… again, (shrug). If the convention of not having interesting discussions on hidden branches takes hold, and I want to respond to something on a hidden branch, I can respond on an open thread instead. But you’re right that I might not do so.
By the way, I’m enjoying the irony here.
The way to avoid contributing pagerank is rel=nofollow.
I don’t appreciate the absurd insinuations of the title of this post, or having my time spent on revisiting that gibberish.
(The property of being “critical of cryonics” holds much less explanatory power about the reasons for comments’ deletion than the quality of their content; one of the links included in the post itself includes a copy of one of the comments, so it seems like the author had access to that information at the time of posting.)
I’ll change it then. My apologies. “Moderation of apparent trolling” sound good?
Edit: Not sure I like that one either, but it’s at least less sensationalistic.
Edit 2: I should clarify that the original title was picked after an irc chat with another member who thought that it was indefensible to delete a comment critical of cryonics and suggested that I post a discussion topic requesting an explanation. I wasn’t sure whether the comment had actually been deleted by a moderator.
Much better. But it’ll resend the post to everyone subscribed to discussion feed again, so you shouldn’t do it. Add a note at the top of the post instead (by editing it without editing the title).
Edit: Too late. Oh well.
If the feeds were available in Atom format, with correct GUIDs, then reader software can recognize reliably that it’s the same post modified.
Yes. You can check with the issue tracker if this issue was filed and file it if it wasn’t.
On a forum with a working downvote mechanism, deleting non-spam or non-basilisks is indefensible. Another reason why LW should have an public censorship policy.
The problem is downvoting fatigue when someone posts multiple troll comments. I support banhammering all of a user’s posts when they’re all being downvoted and are all clearly not suited to LW.
You could just banhammer the user and leave the posts be.
We currently don’t have a button for that.
That would seem then to be the most obvious convenient fix- make it possible to ban people without deleting comments. Or even better, have a button which bans them and deletes all comments that don’t have replies. That way the only comments removed are those which didn’t have any discussion associated with them.
Another fix would be to have comments by users with sufficiently negative karma hidden by default.
“Repeat troll offenders’ comments will be treated as spam and deleted.”
How’s that for a policy?
I wouldn’t say indefensible. Possibly unnecessary though.
I do have to say it was gratifying for me (the target of some of the comments) to see them downvoted so quickly. :)