Thank you for your hard work! Neither the decision itself nor the work of justifying it and discussing it is particularly easy, as I can say from experience. I appreciate you putting so much effort into trying to keep the site healthy.
This post has comments from some people who agree and from some people who disagree with the decision. It seems worth making explicit that this discussion may underrepresent the amount of people who agree, because some of the people with the strongest agreement would be the ones who’ve already left the site because of Said.
I don’t think this sort of abstract analysis is valid. For instance, you could argue that it may underrepresent the people who disagree, because it’s become increasingly clear that Said-style criticism is unwelcome on LW in the past few months, as the conflict has escalated.
Think it’s just really hard to know without doing a lot of work.
I think it’d be more accurate to say that “there’s this other factor too” rather than “this analysis is not valid”?
There are a number of comments expressing disagreement that have gotten a fair number of upvotes, so it doesn’t look to me like expressing disagreement would be unwelcome.
Edited to add: I should also mention that I don’t think this comment came out of “abstract analysis”. It came from the fact that back when I banned Eugine Nier, I then reached out to a user who had left the site because of him to let them know their harasser was banned. The user’s response was basically, “glad to hear, but I still don’t feel like coming back”. So at least in one previous case, users who had left because of a now-banned user were actually permanently out of the resulting discussion.
Thank you for your hard work! Neither the decision itself nor the work of justifying it and discussing it is particularly easy, as I can say from experience. I appreciate you putting so much effort into trying to keep the site healthy.
This post has comments from some people who agree and from some people who disagree with the decision. It seems worth making explicit that this discussion may underrepresent the amount of people who agree, because some of the people with the strongest agreement would be the ones who’ve already left the site because of Said.
I don’t think this sort of abstract analysis is valid. For instance, you could argue that it may underrepresent the people who disagree, because it’s become increasingly clear that Said-style criticism is unwelcome on LW in the past few months, as the conflict has escalated.
Think it’s just really hard to know without doing a lot of work.
I think it’d be more accurate to say that “there’s this other factor too” rather than “this analysis is not valid”?
There are a number of comments expressing disagreement that have gotten a fair number of upvotes, so it doesn’t look to me like expressing disagreement would be unwelcome.
Edited to add: I should also mention that I don’t think this comment came out of “abstract analysis”. It came from the fact that back when I banned Eugine Nier, I then reached out to a user who had left the site because of him to let them know their harasser was banned. The user’s response was basically, “glad to hear, but I still don’t feel like coming back”. So at least in one previous case, users who had left because of a now-banned user were actually permanently out of the resulting discussion.
I agree, the meta-point of selection bias is valid but the direction of bias is unclear.